How can I mix and match custom Spring schema types with traditional Spring schema types?

Question

Let's say I have a class Person with properties name and age, and it can be configured with Spring like so:

<beans:bean id="person" class="com.mycompany.Person">
  <beans:property name="name" value="Mike"/>
  <beans:property name="age" value="38"/>
</beans:bean>

I'd like to have a custom Spring schema element for it, which is easy to do, allowing me to have this in my Spring configuration file:

<Person name="Mike" age="38"/>

The schema definition would look something like this:

<xsd:complexType name="Person">
  <xsd:complexContent>
    <xsd:extension base="beans:identifiedType">
      <xsd:attribute name="name" type="xsd:string"/>
      <xsd:attribute name="age" type="xsd:int"/>
    </xsd:extension>
  </xsd:complexContent>
</xsd:complexType>

Based on this, let's now say I would like the option of mixing and matching my custom schema element with traditional elements and attributes of Spring beans, so I could have the option of doing this:

<Person name="Mike">
  <beans:property name="age" value="38"/>
</Person>

How would I go about doing that? Perhaps this is impossible without some major customization, but I'm hoping there is some fairly simple mechanism to achieve this. I thought extending "bean" might be the trick, but that doesn't look to be correct.

Answer 1

First of, if your example is really all you want to do, consider using p-namespace instead and save yourself some major headache:

<beans:bean id="person" class="com.mycompany.Person" p:name="Mike" p:age="38"/>

Yes, it doesn't look as pretty as <Person name= age= /> but there's no custom code to write :-)

If that does not satisfy your requirements, you're looking at implementing your own namespace / bean definition parser. Spring documentation has a chapter dedicated to that which will explain it better then I can. If you hit any issues, please post back specific questions and I'll try to help.