Could annotation based and xml based configuration be used together in spring 2.5?

Question

Hi

I've been working on a project where controllers have been written extending Controller classes. Could I configure and use the POJO based Controllers as well (using @Controller) in the same application?

Many thanks

Answer 1

Absolutely. You can mix them together as much as you choose. DispatcherServlet should recognise both old-style and new-style controllers together in the same app.

Answer 2

Yes you can. You'll need to include the Spring JavaConfig project library, as annotation configuration was not part of the 2.5 core.

Here is an example I wrote a while back comparing Google Guice with Spring. Toward the bottom (look for @ImportXml), I show how you can combine Spring XML configuration with annotation configuration. The configuration looks like this:

@Configuration
@ImportXml(locations = "classpath:com/earldouglas/guicespringjc/spring/config.xml")
public class XmlSpringConfiguration {
}

See the Spring Reference regarding combining XML and Annotation configuration. This is from the documentation for Spring 3, but it should still apply (with perhaps minor changes in class names and paths from the old Spring JavaConfig project).

Answer 3

Many thanks skaffman :).

Could you guide me to some reference where I could find how to configure my application so I could use both of them together? Actually, I did configure it in one of my test applications where it was working fine but now that I try to configure it, exactly as I did before, in the main application and start my application, it doesnt even run the first controller that is needed to start the application and is giving me an error,

"No adapter for handler[myPackage.myApplication.MyFirstOldStyleController]: Does your handler implement a supported interface like Controller?".

And it indeed is extending a Controller. Could you help me understand why would i be getting such error? That will be very helpful.

Thanks again

Answer 4

Thanks jamestastic and skaffman, its working all fine now :)

Below are the lines needed to to be addeded to the web configuration file to have them working together:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"  
       xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"                    ...line1
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans 
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd                        
            http://www.springframework.org/schema/context                           ...line2
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd"&gt;  ...line3



    <context:annotation-config/>   ...line4

    <context:component-scan base-package="myPackage"/>  ...line5

    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping"/>  ...line6

    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter"/>   ...line7

    <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.SimpleControllerHandlerAdapter"/>  ...line8

</beans>

I was too lazy to not to add line 8 in my main application.

Many thanks