Spring to understand properties in YAML

[litius]

YAML makes a lot of sense for properties, and I am using it currently on the project, but have difficulties to inject properties in a

<property name="productName" value="${client.product.name}" />

fashion.

Anything I am missing, or I should create a custom YamlPropertyPlaceholderConfigurer ?

Thank you,
/Anatoly

[Costin Leau]

What sort of difficulties are you facing? Seems that you're using the PropertyPlaceholder configurer which reads a java.util.Properties object. YAML is used for serialization so as long as the deserialization creates a valid entry inside the source Properties, things should work.

[litius]

@Costin,

Thank you for replying. Let me try to me more specific on what I would like to achieve. Let's say I have this datasource YAML config:

datasource.yml:

    datasource:
        url: jdbc:hsqldb:file:hsqldb/sample
        username: sa
        password:
        configuration:
            driver: org.hsqldb.blabla

I would like to be able to use "property-placeholder":

<context:property-placeholder location="classpath:META-INF/env/props/datasource.yml"/>

and I would like to access properties in a normal "property-placeholder" way:

<bean id="datasource" class="...">
    <property name="url" value="${datasource.url}"/>
    <property name="username" value="${datasource.username}"/>
    .... .... ....
</bean>

Thank you,
/Anatoly

[Costin Leau]

There is no YAML reader out of the box in Spring. Potentially the JSON/YAML Java libraries out there allow these types of files to be read into properties in which case you could plug this into PPC.
I would recommend this approach since all you need to do is change the way the Properties file is stored rather then the PPC itself (i.e. YamlPropertyPlaceholderConfigurer).

[litius]

@Costin,

I understand it is beyond a Spring scope, but would you know whether there are any Java library that is able to convert YAML to properties / XML? I looked at snakeyaml, and others, but they do not have such capabilities.

Again, I understand this is not a Spring related question, but once we have an answer, the Spring will kick in immediately

Would appreciate any help on this. Thank you,
/Anatoly

[jtravis]

I second the need for a YAML PPC. It's possible the Grails folks have already produced code to make this possible.

[bostone]

There's no need to implement YamlPropertyPlaceholderConfigurer. I posted article to my dev blog explaining how to read Yaml properties into Spring here http://goo.gl/qg0Oi