What is difference between id and name in beans config xml?

[spencers]

In beans configuration file:

------------------------------------------------------------------
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC "-//SPRING/DTD BEAN/EN" "http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd">
<beans>
<bean id="xxx" name="xxx"
------------------------------------------------------------------

what is the difference between id and name property except that id should be unique in the IOC container?

Thanks.

Spencers

[Jörg Heinicke]

The id gets automatically and stricter validated by the XML parser since it has a special meaning in XML. So for example you can't add twice the same id into the XML, the parser would complain. This helps to edit the file since you can see an error in an XML editor. That's no possible for name. Spring can only complain at runtime about duplicate name.

(With the XSDs in Spring 2.0 the situation might be slightly different than it was with DTDs. They can express more complex validation rules, don't know if you can prevent duplicate name attributes in the whole file with them.)

Jörg

[Joris Kuipers]

The id gets automatically and stricter validated by the XML parser since it has a special meaning in XML. So for example you can't add twice the same id into the XML, the parser would complain.

Also, you cannot use certain characters in an XML id attribute: if you're using URLs as bean names, as is common in Spring MVC, then you'll need to use name="/path/somecontroller" instead of id, since the slashes are not legal characters to use for an XML id. That's actually the most common reason to use name instead of id. Others are if you need to specify several aliases using a comma seperated list in the name attribute: comma's are also not allowed inside an XML id.

[Jörg Heinicke]

Also, you cannot use certain characters in an XML id attribute ...

That's what I subsumed in

The id gets automatically and stricter validated by the XML parser since it has a special meaning in XML.

Jörg

[NavinBansal]

each bean have own unique id in container. id can not contain special character like '/' and patteren matching like '/*.html' etc.
but name property can follow this feature best form spring mvc. name property can set with special character like "/*.html".which is directly called in Url also.