Order of loading contextConfigLocation in web.xml of Spring Servlet project

Question

Suppose that I have a Spring Java project and I am trying to configure it as a web server servlet. Here is a stripped-down version of the web.xml f

Answer 1

What better way to actually have the Spring debug logs tell you itself the order. If you want to get into the code you can also take a look at the org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet (DispatcherServlet extends this class) Just enable the logger "org.springframework.web.servlet" to debug level in your preferred logging framework

Here is how the logs would typically look like - clearly the root context is loaded first and is set as the parent for the context heirarchy - the servlet context is loaded next.

INFO : org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader - Loading XML bean definitions from ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/spring/generalApplicatonContext.xml]
INFO : org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader - Root WebApplicationContext: initialization completed in 256 ms
DEBUG: org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet - Initializing servlet 'my-servlet'
INFO :Initializing Spring FrameworkServlet 'appServlet'
INFO : org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet - FrameworkServlet 'my-servlet': initialization started
DEBUG: org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet - Servlet with name 'appServlet' will try to create custom WebApplicationContext context of class 'org.springframework.web.context.support.XmlWebApplicationContext', using parent context [Root WebApplicationContext: startup date [Fri May 15 17:08:24 IST 2015]; root of context hierarchy
DEBUG: Loading XML bean definitions from ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/spring/specificApplicationContext.xml