Re: [Springframework-developer] Creating reusable component packages with Spring

[Patrick B. <pbu...@gm...>]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004 16:07:45 +0100, C=E9sar Ordi=F1ana <co...@di...> w=
rote:

> Anyway, in case it could be needed for other beans, what do you think
> about the idea to allow to modify or extend a bean from one definition
> file, which is already defined in a previous definition file, instead of
> completely redefining them?

I see an advantage of this since the project I'm working also needs
the ability to essentially add to the definition of a bean. Our
use-case is the same with respect to adding mappings to a Hibernate
Session Factory.

We have our core code and mappings in a jar file that gets used by
many web apps. Each of these web apps should then be able to define
their own mappings that possibly relate to the core ones, but add
additional app specific entities. We have more than one SessionFactory
since separate parts of the app can be stored in separate, unrelated
databases. With the current setup, if the web app author wants to add
a new mapping, they have to duplicate our SessionFactory definition,
which would make future upgrades problematic since the end user would
need to keep in sync with our latest SessionFactory definitions.

I'm +1 for some mechanism to tell the bean factory to add to the
current bean if already defined.

Patrick