Spring Dependency Injection with JBOSS : the CLASSPATH issue

When facing the problem of deploying web archives (war) to be configured through Spring dependency injection, you probably want to have generic applications that do not have to be recompile every time you deploy them on new configurations.

In my current project I need to configure a REST API with various parameters (host name, database paths, maximum of records per request). For this I use Spring dependency injection where the parameters are injected at run-time via a resource file located outside the war file, in a folder specified by the Windows CLASSPATH variable (my testing and production platforms are windows machine).

First I need to add a windows CLASSPATH system variable (in your system properties/environment variables)  if this variable does not exist. Then I add the resources.xml file directly in the folder specified by CLASSPATH. You can also use a sub-folder but you will need to hard-code the name of the folder in your spring config file - in my case applicationContext.xml located in ./src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
 xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
 xsi:schemaLocation="
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context 
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd">
    <import resource="classpath:/resources.xml" />
</beans>

My resources.xml looks like this:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
 xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
 xsi:schemaLocation="
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context 
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd">
  <bean id="custService" 
                      scope="prototype"
                      class=".....">
   <property name="hostName" value="121.122.123.124"/>
   <property name="databasePath" value="..."/>
   <property name="maxRecordsPerRequest" value="1000"/>
  </bean>

</beans>

One issue you might encounter when you try to deploy your application on JBoss is that the web application server does not take into account the CLASSPATH out-of-the-box (I am using redhat EAP 5.0.X - production setting), but this might be also the case with JBOSS community edition.

Your war file will probably fail to deploy and you will find a bunch of errors in your log file ./jboss-as/server/<setting>/log/server.log  including:

org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem: 
Failed to import bean definitions from URL location [classpath:/resources.xml]
Offending resource: ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml]; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException:
IOException parsing XML document from class path resource [resources.xml]; 
nested exception is java.io.FileNotFoundException: 
class path resource [resources.xml] cannot be opened because it does not exist

What is missing is that you need to tell JBoss about your CLASSPATH variable.
Just edit ./jboss-as/bin/run.bat and add the CLASSPATH variable and you will be up and running in no time.

:RESTART
"%JAVA%" %JAVA_OPTS% ^
   -Djava.endorsed.dirs="%JBOSS_ENDORSED_DIRS%" ^
   -classpath "%JBOSS_CLASSPATH%;%CLASSPATH%" ^
   org.jboss.Main -b 0.0.0.0 -c production %*