Spring approach for changing configuration source by environment - spring

Question

I'm new to Spring and trying to figure out the best way to handle the following scenario:
We have an application where for local development and testing, all configuration values are pulled from a Properties file. When the app is deployed on to the App Server (Websphere in this case), instead of properties file we use JNDI resource properties.
Is there an accepted way of handling this in Spring? For a non-Spring application I probably would have done something like this using a good ol' factory pattern to decide the config source. For Spring, I've seen examples that use different context XML files per environment (sounds messy), or make use of Spring "Profiles".
Is there a generally accepted practice for this scenario?

Answer 1

Spring profiles are rather new and they were added precisely to address your problems. Moreover they should deprecate all other workarounds like different context XML files you mention.
For the sake of completeness here is an example:
<beans profile="test">
<context:property-placeholder location="/foo/bar/buzz.properties" />
</beans>
<beans profile="prd">
<jee:jndi-lookup id="properties" jndi-name="foo/bar/name"/>
</beans>
Depending on which profile you choose during deployment/startup, only one of the beans above will be instantiated.
Another approach I've never tried but seems to fit your case is default-value attribute in jee namespace:
<jee:jndi-lookup id="properties" jndi-name="foo/bar/name" resource-ref="true"
default-value="classpath:foo.properties"/>
Not sure if this will help you though.

Answer 2

Assuming Spring 3.1, try using profiles like Tomasz suggested, but instead of setting individual JNDI values for production, use
<beans profile="prd">
<context:property-placeholder/>
</beans>
In Spring 3.1, ContextLoaderListener apparently pulls in JNDI props as a PropertySource by default, so with property-placeholder, when you need to access a value you can just use ${some/jndi/name} in applicationContext.xml or a #Value annotation.
To make sure the webapp gets the values from JNDI, add
<context-param>
<param-name>spring.profiles.default</param-name>
<param-value>prd</param-value>
</context-param>
to web.xml.
In your tests, set the system property 'spring.profiles.active' to 'test', and you'll get the values from the props file.

Answer 3

one way to go is you use jndi also for local dev and testing. You could define the same jndi name. I don't know what's your testing server, in practice we use jetty, and maven-jetty plugin to test. It is lightweight and can run from your ide.
another way is like what you said in your question. Making use of Spring profile. Then you could declare different transactionManager beans with same id/name. of course they should be in different profiles. At runtime you could decide which profile should be activated, that is, which bean should be used.