How to define a List bean in Spring?

Question

'm using Spring to define stages in my application. It's configured that the necessary class (here called Configurator) is injected with the stages.

Now I need the List of Stages in another class, named LoginBean. The Configurator doesn't offer access to his List of Stages.

I cannot change the class Configurator.

My Idea:

Define a new bean called Stages and inject it to Configurator and LoginBean. My problem with this idea is that I don't know how to transform this property:

<property ...>

  <list>

    <bean ... >...</bean>

    <bean ... >...</bean>

    <bean ... >...</bean>

  </list>

</property>

into a bean.

Something like this does not work:

<bean id="stages" class="java.util.ArrayList">

Can anybody help me with this?

Answer 1

Import the spring util namespace. Then you can define a list bean as follows:

<?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:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans

                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd

                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/util

                    http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-2.5.xsd">

<util:list id="myList" value-type="java.lang.String">

    <value>foo</value>

    <value>bar</value>

</util:list>

The value-type is the generics type to be used, and is optional. You can also specify the list implementation class using the attribute list-class.