Spring id-reference not working as expected - spring

Question

I'm working my way through the Spring Framework reference documentation with some very basic application code. So far, I've created an ApplicationContext from an XML file and loaded some beans. I believe I understand this process pretty well. I've loaded some basic beans with attributes based on fundamental types and found that straight-forward.
I'm now working on a composite bean with other beans as its attributes. So far, I've been able to set these attributes using a direct reference to a bean and an inner bean. However, when I try to get the idref element to work (see http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/3.2.4.RELEASE/spring-framework-reference/html/beans.html#beans-idref-element) I get the following exception:
java.lang.IllegalStateException: Cannot convert value of type [java.lang.String] to required type [com.example.BasicBean] for property 'idRef': no matching editors or conversion strategy found
Code snippets below:
Application Context XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans ...>
<bean id="id-bean" class="com.example.BasicBean" scope="singleton">
<property name="value" value="31"/>
</bean>
<bean id="ref-bean" class="com.example.BasicBean" scope="singleton">
<property name="value" value="37"/>
</bean>
<bean id="cb" class="com.example.CompositeBean" scope="singleton">
<property name="id" ref="id-bean"/> <!-- works -->
<property name="inner"> <!-- works -->
<bean class="com.example.BasicBean">
<property name="value" value="43"/>
</bean>
</property>
<property name="idRef"> <!-- exception thrown -->
<idref bean="ref-bean"/>
</property>
</bean>
</beans>
Java App Code
public void main()
{
context = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("beans.xml");
CompositeBean cb = context.getBean("cb", CompositeBean.class);
}
Java Bean Code
public class CompositeBean
{
private BasicBean id;
private BasicBean idRef;
private BasicBean inner;
// Default constructor exists
// Setters, getters for each attribute exist
...
}
public class BasicBean
{
private int value;
// Default constructor exists
// Setters, getters for each attribute exist
...
}
Version info: I'm using Eclipse IDE (Kepler), Maven 3.1, Java 7 (1.7.45), Spring 3.2.4
Any thoughts on what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

Thanks #Farid for pointing out that I was mis-using the idref attribute in this instance. As the Spring doco points out (which I'd read several times and still missed this) it's designed for passing the id of a bean around a container and not the actual bean. So, stick to the first two means above (ref and inner bean) for passing a bean around.