[Springframework-developer] Property setting by base-class rather than class in BeanFactory

[Pavel T. <Pa...@ts...>]

Hi,

This may have been discussed before, I did a Google search but nothing came
up.

I was reading something on spring-user yesterday when it struck me, why do
we need to describe each and every property of each and every bean when we
have inheritance. Sure, this may not always be the best choice, but it would
make life easier in many cases and I would think it's relatively easy to
implement.

Possible scenario:

A hierarchy of DAO objects, all extending a base DAO, which in turn extends,
say, HibernateDaoSupport. Then instead of having in applicationContext.xml:

<bean id="xyzDAO" class="com.mycompany.product.dao.hibernate.XyzDAO">
	<property name="sessionFactory">
		<ref local="mySessionFactory">
	</property>
	<property name="somethingElse">
		<value>xyz</value>
	</property>
</bean>

for each and every DAO, you could just write something like:

<bean superclass="com.mycompany.product.dao.hibernate.GenericDao">
	<property name="sessionFactory">
		<ref local="mySessionFactory">
	</property>
</bean>

And then you could still have specific properties for those beans that
require it, like:

<bean id="xyzDAO" class="com.mycompany.product.dao.hibernate.XyzDAO">
	<property name="somethingElse">
		<value>xyz</value>
	</property>
</bean>

Yay or nay? Seems to me it's a better way of dealing with generic properties
across the board and would make refactoring/plugging new implementations
easier? One could even take this a step further and implement property
setting based on regex on the bean ids or classnames much like the pointcut
definitions in the AOP module.

Best regards,
Pavel

--
Pavel Tcholakov
Technology Systems Integration (Pty) Ltd.
Email: pa...@ts... Tel. +27 11 7921094