Combining programmatic BeanFactory with XMl appcontext

[skaffman]

I have an applicationContext.xml that I want to unit-test. The beans in this context refer to other beans, such as a DataSource, which are defined in other contexts. The idea is that I use different DataSource definitions for different environments (e.g. live and test).

The problem I have is that for testing, I need to use a programmatic BeanFactory (specifically, StaticListableBeanFactory) to generate my DataSource bean. I cannot find a way to combine my XML application context with my programmatic bean factory. If I use ClasspathXmlApplicationContext, I can only specify a parent ApplicationContext, not a parent BeanFactory. How do I specify my StaticListableBeanFactory as the parent of my ClasspathXmlApplicationContext, or otherwise find a way of allowing my XMl context to load beans from the programmatic bean factory?

As well as the core API, I've looked at the org.apringframework.test package, but that also seems to assume "config locations" rrather than programmtic bean factories.

[Kees de Kooter]

Here is a snippet, first setup some stuff in code, then load an xml.

Map dataSourceProperties = new HashMap();

dataSourceProperties.put("dataSource.class",
         "org.apache.commons.dbcp.BasicDataSource");
dataSourceProperties.put("dataSource.driverClassName", databaseProperties
         .getDriverName());
dataSourceProperties.put("dataSource.url", databaseProperties.getUrl());
dataSourceProperties.put("dataSource.username", databaseProperties.getUsername());
dataSourceProperties.put("dataSource.password", databaseProperties.getPassword());

GenericApplicationContext applicationContext = new GenericApplicationContext();

// Load from properties
PropertiesBeanDefinitionReader propReader = new PropertiesBeanDefinitionReader(
          applicationContext);
propReader.registerBeanDefinitions(dataSourceProperties);

// Next load other beans
XmlBeanDefinitionReader xmlReader = new XmlBeanDefinitionReader(applicationContext);
xmlReader.loadBeanDefinitions(new ClassPathResource("spring-beans.xml"));

applicationContext.refresh();

[wpoitras]

Would setting the parent of the spring-beans.xml context to the datasource context help?

But why do you need to define your datasource programatically? Why not just define a second XML file and initialize your context using those two files? Also, Spring has some useful TestCase subclasses which make this easy.

[Kees de Kooter]

In this case the datasource info came from another database. I posted the snippet as an example, not as an exact solution for you problem.