CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaspringspring-mvcproperties
Aurasphere
Aurasphere

Reputation: 4011

Best way of managing properties in Spring

I'm writing an application with Spring MVC which I'd like to be configurable with properties files. I looked into Spring's util namespace and found this:

<util:properties id="MyProperties" location="propertiesPath" />

with this, I can annotate my classes field simply with 

@Value("myProperty")

and have the property simply injected. So, it's very simple to read your properties. But when you have to save them, it's not as intuitive.

I've stumbled upon quite a few questions on how to do it properly and I think this represents best what I want to say: Updating a properties file injected by Spring to include a last run timestamp.

My question is: why it's so difficult to save properties in Spring? Am I doing it the wrong way? At this point I am even wondering if saving properties this way is a good practice or if I should use a database.

From Oracle I can read:

The Properties class represents a persistent set of properties. The Properties can be saved to a stream or loaded from a stream.

But Spring seems to make easier only one of them. Please enlighten me.

Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 176

Answers (2)

Romanow Alexey
Romanow Alexey

Reputation: 198

Using properties like this supposed it read-only. If you need some managing with it, you should better write you custom service with pure java properties handling http://www.mkyong.com/java/java-properties-file-examples/

Upvotes: 1

Software Engineer
Software Engineer

Reputation: 16100

Spring is largely involved in creating the static, unchanging, structure of your application, and not really involved in transaction processing or business-logic. Often it defines how transactions are to be processed, but it isn't usually involved in the processing itself. We often talk about the separation of the domain model and the architecture -- spring is about architecture.

Writing something out to a store of some kind, say properties to a disk file, is transactional logic (even if you don't need an explicit transaction to do it). It would be one of the end-user features of your system, not part of the architecture -- it would be a feature (even if the end user, in this case, is a sys-admin). Spring has little support for this type of behaviour -- just as it has little support for storing information regarding dynamic changes to the application context.

Upvotes: 1

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