why doesn't property-placeholder register PropertySource with Environment?

[dukehoops]

trying to wrap my brain around Spring 3.1's Environment + Profiles + PropertySource concepts and don't quite understand why declaring a context:property-placeholder does NOT automatically register underlying PropertySource with ctx's Environment?

Doing this in xml config:

<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:myapp.properties"/>

allows, among other things, to resolve @Value-annotated bean props, for example in a spring bean class:

@Value("${myprop1}") //assume declared in myapp.properties
private String prop1Value;

@Autowired
private ConfigurableApplicationContext ctx;

...yet, inside the same bean, the following will not return true

ctx.getEnvironment().containsProperty("myprop1"); //returns false

which seems inconsistent v. @Value eval.

..unless I write another bean that, at container startup will do something like:

        PropertiesPropertySource ps = new PropertiesPropertySource("myapp_props", myappProps);
        ctx.getEnvironment().getPropertySources().addFirst(ps);

Why wouldn't the last step be done automatically by the framework as result of context:property-placeholder declaration?

just trying to understand the rationale...

[Marten Deinum]

PropertyPlaceHolderConfigurer is only used to REPLACE place holders in the configuration is is not to be used to load and expose properties files (that is a different kind of task).

You can do it the other way around, create a property source and register that with the PPHC.