Why am I getting an exception raised from Spring.NET on the call to ContextRegistry.GetContext()?

Question

Even though the solution is so obvious I should have never have posted this, I'm leaving it up as a reminder and a useful point of reference to others.

I've got the following in my app.config file:

  <sectionGroup name="spring">
    <section name="context" type="Spring.Context.Support.ContextHandler, Spring.Core"/>
    <section name="objects" type="Spring.Context.Support.DefaultSectionHandler, Spring.Core" />
  </sectionGroup>

Followed by:

<spring>
    <context>
        <resource uri="config://spring/objects"/>
    </context>
    <objects xmlns="http://www.springframework.net"&gt;
        <object name="mediaLibrary" type="AlbumLibraryWPF.AlbumLibrary, AlbumLibraryWPF"/>
    </objects>
</spring>

Then in my app I've got:

using Spring.Context;
using Spring.Context.Support;

public partial class AlbumChecker : Window
{
    private DataTable dataTable;

    private Library library;
    private Thread libraryThread;

    public AlbumChecker()
    {
        InitializeComponent();

        CreateToolTips();

        IApplicationContext ctx = ContextRegistry.GetContext();
        library = (Library)ctx.GetObject("mediaLibrary");

        // Other initialisation
    }

    // Other code
}

It all compiles quite nicely, however, I'm getting an exception raised on the call to GetContext():

Error creating context 'spring.root': Could not load type from string value
'AlbumLibraryWPF.AlbumLibrary, AlbumLibraryWPF'.

I've checked the Spring.NET documentation and can't see what I'm doing wrong - but I clearly have got something wrong, otherwise it wouldn't raise the exception!

'AlbumLibraryWPF' is the namespace and 'AlbumLibraryWPF.AlbumLibrary' is the fully qualified name of the class I want to instantiate. I'm guessing that it's this I've got wrong, but can't see how.

Answer 1

You should use tha id attribute instead of name:

<object id="mediaLibrary" type="AlbumLibraryWPF.AlbumLibrary, AlbumLibraryWPF"/>

Also it should be config://spring/objects instead of config://spring/obects.

You need to double check that you have a type called AlbumLibrary in AlbumLibraryWPF namespace defined in AlbumLibraryWPF assembly.

Answer 2

The name after the comma should be the assembly name, which is not necessarily the same as the namespace name.

HTH, Kent

Answer 3

I feel such a fool.

It was because I'd failed to copy the AlbumLibrary.dll to the correct output directory. That meant that Spring couldn't find it - even after I'd fixed the assembly name problem Kent highlighted.