Spring: How to set property to value of a property of a bean

[Robert Willems]

Hi all,

hopefully somebody knows this. With Spring it is easy to set a property of a bean to another bean.

<property name="myProperty">
    <ref bean="someBean" />
</property>

However i need to set the property of a bean to the value of a property of
another bean.

In non-valid Spring xml i would like something like the following

<property name="myProperty">
    <ref bean="someBean" property="propB" />
</property>

It would set the property named "myProperty" to the valu that was retrieve from the property named "propB" in the bean named "someBean".

Does somebody know if this is possible?

Thanks in advance...

Regards,
Robert

[Robert Willems]

Always a joy to finally find an answer to a question. A bit unfortunate if it is about 30 minutes after posting for help ;-).

But here is the solution:

        <property name="myProperty">
            <bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPathFactoryBean">
                <property name="targetObject">
                    <ref bean="someBean" />
                </property>
                <property name="propertyPath">
                    <value>propB</value>
                </property>
            </bean>
        </property>

The PropertyPathFactoryBean can lookup a property of a bean and expose that value as a bean. Cool!

Regards,
Robert

[Christophe Verré]

Also, you could make your bean BeanFactoryAware and get the value of the other bean using the factory.