Spring MVC Annotations with Global Context context

Question

I have a spring dispatcher servlet with servlet-name "spring-mvc". The spring-mvc-servlet.xml appears as follows:

<bean id="viewResolver"
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.UrlBasedViewResolver">
    <property name="viewClass" 
        value="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.JstlView"/>
    <property name="prefix" value="/WEB-INF/jsp/"/>
    <property name="suffix" value=".jsp"/>
</bean>

<bean 
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping"/>

<bean 
    class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter"/>

In a file in WEB-INF/annotation-context.xml I have the annotation scanner defined. All of my annotated classes are loaded and other spring beans are able to load them ok.

However, the path mappings do not work from spring-mvc. If I copy the context-scanner to spring-mvc-servlet.xml, then they work.

Is it possible for spring-mvc-servlet.xml to reference beans defined at the global spring level?

Answer 1

You can load your contexts hierarchically so that context described in annotation-context.xml becomes a parent of your Spring MVC context. The latter will then be able to access all the beans defines in the former.

Spring documenation describes several ways to do it. For example, in your web.xml:

// load parent context
<context-param>
  <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
  <param-value>/WEB-INF/annotation-context.xml</param-value>
</context-param>

<listener>
  <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

// load Spring MVC context
<servlet>
  <servlet-name>spring-mvc</servlet-name>
  <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
  <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>