Multiple Bean factories

[srikanthvishwanath]

If I create bean instances from 2 bean factories, is there a way that I can invoke a method on the instance created by other bean factory?

to make it clear, if I have bean factory 1 creating bean 1 and bean factory 2 creating bean 2, is it possible to access bean 2 from bean 1.

[Osvaldas Grigas]

Beans are just plain objects, so you can always take an object instantiated by BeanFactory 1 and pass it to a method of an object instantiated by BeanFactory 2.

If, on the other hand, you want to have configuration for XmlBeanFactory 2 like this:

<bean name="bean2" class="Bean2">
    <property name="field" ref="bean1"/>
</bean>

where "bean1" is defined in XmlBeanFactory 1, then this kind of configuration will only work if XmlBeanFactory 1 is a parent to XmlBeanFactory 2. That is, if XmlBeanFactory 2 was created like this:

XmlBeanFactory beanFactory2 = new XmlBeanFactory(xmlConfig2, beanFactory1);

For details, see http://static.springsource.org/sprin...ns-ref-element