Re: [Springframework-developer] Include/import directive in XML bean definition files

[Colin S. <col...@ex...>]

I don't have anything against this really, but on the other hand I think 
people would almost always be better of specifying the files to be 
combined from the external creator of the BeanFactory or 
ApplicationContext, which Spring allows you to do pretty easilly 
everywhere, in that almost everywhere you can specify one file, you can 
specify multiple files. My feeling (although I haven't verified it) is 
that the relative import is probably going to fail in a classpath 
resource situation anywehre where the file is not actually on the 
filesystem. For example, in WebLogic, jar files with classes are usually 
not actually expanded out to the filesystem. So if you get the URL for 
one of these resources, you'll get
  zip:path/to/jar/file/jarfile.jar#real/path/to/resource
now I think the code in the patch would fail when it tries to build a 
relative URL for the imported relative fragment, where it calls
  new URL(this.url, relativePath)

Of course this will work in many situations, but people are probably 
better off doing something portable. So if we add it, we should probably 
strongly suggest that people try to avoid using the import and specify 
the files externally.

Colin

jürgen höller [werk3AT] wrote:

>Any thoughts on include/import directives in XML bean definition files?
>
>http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/spring/browse/SPR-137
>
>This is about elements in XML bean definitions that allow to include other XML bean definition files, with paths that are interpreted as relative to the current file. Basically, this is an alternative to combining multiple XML bean definition files via "contextConfigLocation" parameters.
> 
>Remaining questions are mostly about syntax. One possibility would be like as follows:
> 
>  <beans>
> 
>    <include resource="includeBeans.xml"/>
> 
>    <bean.../>
> 
>  </beans>
> 
>Should the tag be called "include" or "import"? Any suggestions or objections regarding such functionality in general? I'm personally still a fan of "contextConfigLocation", but I guess there are valid use cases for keeping includes directly in bean definition files.
> 
>As a side note, one can already use standard XML entity includes to achieve something similar. However, such include files are not full DTD-compliant XML files themselves, and the XML include syntax is rather awkward.
> 
>  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
>  <!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC "-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN" "http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd <http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd> " [
>  <!ENTITY contextInclude SYSTEM "org/springframework/web/context/WEB-INF/contextInclude.xml">
>  ]>
>
>  <beans>
> 
>    &contextInclude;
>
> 
>    <bean.../>
> 
>  </beans>
> 
>I'd like to clarify our way to proceed with this ASAP, to get it into 1.1 RC1 if we decide to adopt it.
> 
>Juergen
>  
>