We're building a Spring-based application which will be delivered to end users as a distribution package. Users are responsible for properly configuring whatever needs to be configured (it's mostly about various filesystem locations, folder access permissions, etc). There's a good idea to make the app help users understand what is not configured or which parts of configuration are invalid.
Our current approach is a custom ApplicationContextInitializer which does all the environment validation "manually" and then registers few "low level" beans in the application context explicitly. If something is wrong, initializer throws, exception is caught somewhere in main(), interpreted (converted into plain English) and then displayed.
While this approach works fine, I'm wondering if there are any best practices to minimize hand-written code and use Spring whenever possible.
Here's an illustrative example. The application requires a folder for file uploads. This means:
There should be a configuration file
This file should be accessible by the app
This file should have no syntax errors
This file should explicitly define some specific property (let it be app.uploads.folder)
This property should describe the existing filesystem entity
This entity should be a folder
The app should have read/write access to this folder
Does Spring provide any tools to implement this sort of validation easily?
Spring Boot has a nice feature for context and external configuration validation. If you define a POJO class and declare it as #ConfigurationProperties then Spring will bind the Environment (external properties and System/OS typically) to its properties using a DataBinder. E.g.
#ConfigurationProperties(name="app.uploads")
public class FileUploadProperties {
private File folder;
// getters and setters ommitted
}
will bind to app.uploads.folder and ensure that it is a File. For extra validation you can do it manually in the setter, or you can implement Validator in your FileUploadProperties or you can use JSR-303 annotations on the fields. By default an external property in app.uploads.* that doesn't bind will throw an exception (e.g. a mis-spelled property name, or a conversion/format error).
If you use Spring Boot Autoconfigure #EnableAutoConfigure you don't have to do anything else, but if it's just vanilla Spring (Boot) you need to say #EnableConfigurationProperties in your #Configuration somewhere as well.
A bonus feature: if you also use the Spring Boot Actuator you will also get JMX and HTTP support (in a webapp) for inspecting the bindable and bound properties of #ConfigurationProperties beans. The HTTP endpoint is "/configprops".
Related
In a Spring Boot application how do you register custom converts to be used when processing application configuration?
I have made a custom convert (org.springframework.core.convert.converter.Converter) so it can be used by the ApplicationConversionService/Binder to parse #ConfiguraitonProperties defined in application.properties and application.yaml configuration files but do not know how to register it.
I have tried the solution here https://stackoverflow.com/a/41205653/45708 but it creates an instance of my converter after the application configuration parameters have been processed.
I ran into this issue myself recently. From what I can tell, the key issue is that binding to configuration properties occurs very early in the Spring startup process, before the Application Context is fully initialized. Therefore the usual methods for registering a converter are not reliable. In fact the ConversionService used for configuration binding appear to be a one-off and not really connected to the ConversionService that is stored in the Application Context.
I was able to get something working but it feels like a hack, as it relies on internal implementation details that may work today but not tomorrow. In any case, this is the code I used:
((ApplicationConversionService) ApplicationConversionService.getSharedInstance()).addConverter(myCustomConverter);
The trick I found was to make sure this gets called as soon as possible at application startup so that it gets called before the configuration binding where it's needed. I put it in a #PostConstruct block inside my main #SpringBootApplication class as this seemed to get invoked early on, at least in my case.
I am trying to build a Spring Cloud Configuration server that retrieves properties from a proprietary property server (not Git) using a RefreshScope annotation on the clients to re-inject changed properties
Since there are lots of properties and processing, I want to be able to do a conditional request, so that if no properties are changed since the supplied date, nothing will be injected.
I implemented the EnvironmentRepository interface and overrode the findOne() method to only retrieve the properties if they have changed, and otherwise return an empty map.
I also tried returning null from findOne() but that causes a NullPointerException to be thrown in the config server.
If I return the environment object, the properties are re-injected correctly, but I am trying to avoid that in the case where there are no changes
Does Spring provide some hook method where the config server can notify the config client to leave its properties as they are, and not to re-inject its properties?
I have develop a new Connector. This connector requires to be configured with two parameters, lets say:
default_trip_timeout_milis
default_trip_threshold
Challenge is, I want read ${myValue_a} and ${myValue_a} from an API, using an HTTP call, not from a file or inline values.
Since this is a connector, I need to make this API call somewhere before connectors are initialized.
FlowVars aren't an option, since they are initialized with the Flows, and this is happening before in the Mule app life Cycle.
My idea is to create an Spring Bean implementing Initialisable, so it will be called before Connectors are init, and here, using any java based libs (Spring RestTemplate?) , call API, get values, and store them somewhere (context? objectStore?) , so the connector can access them.
Make sense? Any other ideas?
Thanks!
mmm you could make a class that will create the properties in the startup and in this class obtain the API properties via http request. Example below:
public class PropertyInit implements InitializingBean,FactoryBean {
private Properties props = new Properties();
#Override
public Object getObject() throws Exception {
return props;
}
#Override
public Class getObjectType() {
return Properties.class;
}
}
Now you should be able to load this property class with:
<context:property-placeholder properties-ref="propertyInit"/>
Hope you like this idea. I used this approach in a previous project.
I want to give you first a strong warning on doing this. If you go down this path then you risk breaking your application in very strange ways because if any other components depend on this component you are having dynamic components on startup, you will break them, and you should think if there are other ways to achieve this behaviour instead of using properties.
That said the way to do this would be to use a proxy pattern, which is a proxy for the component you recreate whenever its properties are changed. So you will need to create a class which extends Circuit Breaker, which encapsulates and instance of Circuit Breaker which is recreated whenever its properties change. These properties must not be used outside of the proxy class as other components may read these properties at startup and then not refresh, you must keep this in mind that anything which might directly or indirectly access these properties cannot do so in their initialisation phase or your application will break.
It's worth taking a look at SpringCloudConfig which allows for you to have a properties server and then all your applications can hot-reload those properties at runtime when they change. Not sure if you can take that path in Mule if SpringCloud is supported yet but it's a nice thing to know exists.
It is hard to understand but for my application a required format. I have some custom libraries which are included at runtime and so they are not in the spring application context. To get apis from spring boot application I catched required apis and overhand this to my external classes.
To show an example:
HashValueService hashValueService
= (HashValueService) appContext.getBean("hashValueServiceImpl");
ServiceList srvList = new ServiceList();
srvList.setHashValueService(hashValueService);
In this way I'm able to get access to my database, which is in my application context.
I have a lot of properties distributed in the whole application. So I want to use the default application.properties to centralized often used properties in my application, like the keystore.
For that I edited application.properties with this line:
application.keystore=server.jks
But of course the usage of the Spring's #Value does show me a null for that attribute, because this class is not in my application context:
#Value("${application.keystore}")
private String keystore;
Do you have an idea to overhand this properties to this customer libraries? Maybe the creation of a new property file whould help? Thank u a lot.
Majority of Spring magic is done by BeanPostProcessors. Take a good look at them - link.
#Value wiring (and much more) is performed by AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor, you can use it for your purpose:
AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor beanPostProcessor =
appContext.getBean(AutowiredAnnotationBeanPostProcessor.class);
ServiceList srvList = new ServiceList();
beanPostProcessor.processInjection(srvList);
After that, your ServiceList should have String keystore field initialized.
I am currently deploying my custom controls as OSGi plugins and I wanted to do the same thing with my beans. I have tried putting them into the OSGi plugin and it works fine but the only problem I have is the faces-config.
It seems it has to be called faces-config in the OSGi plugin to work but that means i can't use beans in the NSF anymore because it seems to ignore the local faces-config.
Is there a way to change the name of the faces-config in the OSGi plugin?
Something like FEATURE-faces-config.xml?
In the class in your plugin that extends AbstractXspLibrary, you can override "getFacesConfigFiles", which should return an array of strings representing paths within the plugin to additional files of any name to load as faces-config additions. For example:
#Override
public String[] getFacesConfigFiles() {
return new String[] {
"com/example/config/beans.xml"
};
}
Then you can put the config file in that path within your Java source folder (or another folder that is included in build.properties) and it will be loaded in addition to your app's normal faces-config, beans and all.
The NSFs are running as separate, distinct Java applications. The OSGi plugin is running in the OSGi layer, above all those distinct Java applications, as a single code base. Consequently, the faces-config is only at that level.
It's possible to load them dynamically, by using an ImplicitObjectFactory, loaded from an XspContributor. That's what is done in OpenNTF Domino API for e.g. userScope (which is a bean stored in applicationScope of an NSF). See org.openntf.domino.xsp.helpers.OpenntfDominoImplicitObjectFactory, which is referenced in OpenntfDominoXspContributor, loaded via the extension point of type "com.ibm.xsp.library.Contributor".
A few caveats:
You have no control over what happens if you try to register your bean with a name the developer also uses for a different variable in that scope.
Unless you add code to check if the library is enabled, as we do, you'll be adding the bean to every database on the server.
You still need to add the library to the NSF. Unless you also provide a component that those databases will all use, there's no way you can programmatically add it, as far as I know.
It might be easier to skip the bean approach and just add an instance of the Java class in beforePageLoad, page controller class, or however you're managing the backing to the relevant XPage (if viewScope) or application (if sessionScope / applicationScope).