Velocity AbstractSearchTool Spring-aware

[Prime]

Hi,

is it possible to make the AbstractSearchTool spring-aware?
I need to put an dao Object in my searchToolImpl to execute
a query against the database.
Do i have to set some options in the toolbox.xml config file or
should i implement some interface to get it going?

Regards
Tim

[jchase]

It's very possible.

1) Make sure your tool implements org.apache.velocity.tools.view.tools.ViewTool
2) Implement ViewTool's public void init(Object obj) method something like so:

    public void init(Object obj) {
        logger.debug("initializing " + this.getClass().getName());

        ServletContext servletContext = (ServletContext) obj;
        WebApplicationContext ctx = WebApplicationContextUtils
                .getRequiredWebApplicationContext(servletContext);
        Integer test = (Integer) ctx.getBean("test");
        logger.warn("test from ctx (should be 1):" + test);

    }

3) Define the tool in your Velocity toolbox.xml file - for the example above, define it like:

<tool>
    <key>testtool<key>
    <scope>session</scope>
    <class>your.Tool</class>
  </tool>

All of the above assumes your tool will have session (or application) scope (as defined in toolbox.xml). If you give it request scope, I believe the object that is passed into the init() method will be of type HttpServletRequest.

Good luck!
Jon