Adding a Pre-constructed Bean to a Spring Application Context

Question

I am writing a class that implements the following method:

public void run(javax.sql.DataSource dataSource);

Within this method, I wish to

Answer 1

I have been in the exact same situation. As nobody proposed my solution (and I think my solution is more elegant), I will add it here for future generations :-)

The solution consists of two steps:

1. create parent ApplicationContext and register your existing bean in it.
2. create child ApplicationContext (pass in parent context) and load beans from XML file

Step #1:

//create parent BeanFactory
DefaultListableBeanFactory parentBeanFactory = new DefaultListableBeanFactory();
//register your pre-fabricated object in it
parentBeanFactory.registerSingleton("dataSource", dataSource);
//wrap BeanFactory inside ApplicationContext
GenericApplicationContext parentContext = 
        new GenericApplicationContext(parentBeanFactory);
parentContext.refresh(); //as suggested "itzgeoff", to overcome a warning about events

Step #2:

//create your "child" ApplicationContext that contains the beans from "beans.xml"
//note that we are passing previously made parent ApplicationContext as parent
ApplicationContext context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
        new String[] {"beans.xml"}, parentContext);