Yes, we are listening to you guys; at least Torsten does: There is one prominent feature request that I constantly got after talking about Spring IDE. Especially after my talk at this year’s SpringOne in Antwerp, back in June (can you remember ;-):
Why does Spring IDE not allow to define a Spring configuration file as BeansConfig that is packed in a Jar archive?
Before jumping into the adventure of implementing the Spring 2.0 features support for Spring IDE, Torsten decided to fix ticket #159. With the upcoming version 1.3.6 of Spring IDE you can add Spring configuration files to your Spring IDE configuration that are packaged in a Jar archive. For example the xfire.xml that defines the Spring beans for XFire web service framework.
After adding the Jar to your Spring Project’s classpath (the Jar has to be part of the project, e.g. stored in “WEB-INF/lib/”, and not only available on the classpath like the JDK’s “rt.jar”!!!) you should be able to find a Jar entry in the Spring Beans Config Selection dialog.
You can then select the desired xml file and add that to your Spring IDE configuration.
You can now see the beans defined in that file in the Beans View. Certainly all Spring IDE features are supported on packaged config files, like creating and printing the dependency graph and validation within a BeansConfigSet.
Let us know if this is working for you (as requested)….
This doesn’t work for me.
I use Maven and the Maven Eclipse Integration plugin in the J2EE perspective. Dependency JARs managed by Maven appear in my project under Java Resources/Libraries/Maven2 Dependencies, and as such are present on my project’s classpath. Maven pulls in xfire, but I still can’t add the Spring configs in the XFire jars, because you’re requiring that I actually add them to the project manually - this defeats the purpose of Maven’s dependency management.
My project’s Eclipse .classpath file shows:
<classpathentry kind="con" path="org.eclipse.jst.j2ee.internal.web.container"/><classpathentry kind=”con” path=”org.maven.ide.eclipse.MAVEN2_CLASSPATH_CONTAINER”/>
The JAR files in these containers are copied to WEB-INF/lib at packaging time, but at design time they are not there. I should not have to copy them to WEB-INF/lib manually.
Is there no way to make the contents of such plugin-provided classpath containers visible to Spring IDE?