Adding Xml configurations to a Spring ApplicationContext that is already setup - spring

Question

I was wondering if there is a way to do the following:
have my wep app startup with its servle-context.xml
When, at a certain point, one particular bean in this xml config is instantiated, it will add it's own xml configuration to the application context (or to a child perhaps?).
I'm asking this because I want to pack some functionality in a stand alone library and then reuse it in different projects, so that initializing a bean of this library will load its xml config.
What I wrote is:
public class IrisLibHelper {
ApplicationContext context;
ApplicationContext irisContext;
#Required
#Autowired
public void setContext(ApplicationContext ctx){
this.context = ctx;
ClassPathXmlApplicationContext xap = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(ctx);
xap.setConfigLocation("classpath:com/dariodario/irislib/xmldefs/irisconfig.xml");
this.irisContext = xap;
}
public ApplicationContext getIrisContext() {
return irisContext;
}
public void setIrisContext(ApplicationContext irisContext) {
this.irisContext = irisContext;
}
}
and the irisconfig.xml is:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"
xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop" xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"
xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop
http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx
http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc
http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd">
<!-- <context:component-scan base-package="com.dariodario"></context:component-scan> -->
<mvc:annotation-driven />
<bean
class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter"
p:synchronizeOnSession="true" />
<context:component-scan base-package="com.dariodario.iris.controllers"></context:component-scan>
</beans>
The problem is that it doesn't seem to scan the com.dariodario.iris.controllers package, in fact the controllers don't get mapped! (I've logging debugging on and I don't seen anything).

Answer 1

Why not use the tag <import resource="classpath:applicationConfig.xml" /> ? You can load a spring configuration file which is in jar. In a jar, the Spring XML configuration is always at the root. But if not, you can use this notation: <import resource="${configurablePath}/applicationConfig.xml" /> where configurablePath can be reach by a property place holder or other.
I think this way is cleaner than merging two Spring context.