[Springframework-developer] In BeanFactory, ref to another bean's properties, not to the other bean directly

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

I keep on running into the case where in defining a bean in a bean 
factory or context, I need to set a property to the value of a property 
from another bean, not the bean itself. How are people typically 
handling this limitation?

For that matter, it would be very useful to be able to get a bean into 
the container via an expression. I am for example using the CCPP 
processing API from Sun. All the classes use a factory to get a bean 
instance. So if I need a ProfileFactory, I get one with this code, 
calling a static method:
  ProfileFactory pf  = ProfileFactoryImpl.getInstance();
I have some beans in a context which need this passed in. I would handle 
this right now by defining a new class which is a FactoryBean, and 
returns the result of the above, but that's kludgy. Now handling any 
kind of generic code of this sort needs an expression evaluator, but I 
think this particular idiom (a static method call on a class) could 
probably be handled in a simpler fashion, built-in?

What do you guys think?