New Features of Spring IDE 1.3

Due to the fact that with version 1.3 of Spring IDE we're going to release some really nice little new features that are not that obvious to the end user, we give a preview of the coming features on this page in order to raise your awareness.

For a complete list of fixes and enhancements go to Release 1.3

Spring Project Properties

In the project properties dialog of a SpringProject it's now possible to specify a list of file extensions for the BeansConfig files.

These extensions are used by the "Add.." dialog to filter the list of available BeansConfig files. Additionally the DragAndDropSupport only recognizes BeansConfig files with extensions listed here.

Beans Search

In the Search menu you get a Beans entry. Clicking that menu item give you the following BeansSearch dialog:

Especially the Beans referencing this bean is an easy way to find all Spring beans which are referencing the specified bean. That search is also available via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+G from within the BeansXmlEditor (you need to select the start tag of a bean).

The results will be presented in the Search view:

Open Beans Dialog

Similiar to JDT's Open Type dialog, Spring IDE 1.3 provides an Open Bean dialog. The dialog is available either using the Navigate -> Open Bean... or the keyboard shortcut Alt+Shift+B. The dialog supports all the wildcard features you are used to with Open Type dialog. The filtering is done against the id and name attribute of a Spring bean.

Watch out for the little new icon in your Eclipse toolbar shown here (the right-most on the screenshot):

The dialog looks like this:

New Project Wizard

Spring IDE now provides an extension to the New Java Project wizard. The SpringProjectWizard creates a Java project with the SpringProjectNature already applied.

Beans View

The Spring BeansView is now linkable with the BeansXmlEditor. That means if you select an element in the Spring bean definition within the BeansXmlEditor, the corresponding element in the Spring BeansView is selected.

Refactoring of Spring definition Xml files

Within BeansXmlEditor you get a Refactor -> Refactor Property Element pop-up menu item that refactors a old style property or constructor-arg element into the new, shortcut syntax. Here is an example:

The following snippet

<bean class="TestBean"> 
	<property name="test" > 
		<ref bean="test"/> 
	</property>
</bean>

will be refactored to:

<bean class="TestBean">
	<property name="test" ref="test"></property>
</bean>

That refactoring is certainly only the beginning of Spring IDE's upcoming refactoring support which is targeted to version 2.0