Thursday, June 16, 2011

Escaping property placeholders in Spring XML config

The problem

You might have encountered the awkward situation in which you are
  1. using Spring and XML config
  2. substituting properties into that config via some PropertyPlaceholderConfigurator
  3. needing to set some value in the config to a literal string of the form "${identifier}"

By default, any string of the form in 3. above is a placeholder, and if you have no value for that placeholder, you get an exception. Spring JIRA issue SPR-4953, which recognizes the fact that there is no simple escaping syntax for placeholders, is still open as of this writing.

A snippet such as the following will cause the exception if there is no value available to substitute for the variable customerName, or actually substitute a value for it if it is available. Neither result is desirable in our scenario; we want the "${customerName}" to remain intact when it is injected into our bean.
<bean id="aTrickyBean" class="org.anic.veggies.AreGoodForYou">
    <constructor-arg name="expression" value="Hello, ${customerName}!"/>
</bean>

Most workarounds I have seen are unsatisfactory. You can use a customized placeholder configurator that sets its delimiter characters to something other than the default, for example, which would mean you would have to change the look of all the actual (unescaped) placeholders just to support the ones you want escaped.

The workaround

However, in Spring 3.x, you can work around this issue in a much more simple way using the following trick with SpEL:
<bean id="aTrickyBean" class="org.anic.veggies.AreGoodForYou">
    <constructor-arg name="expression" value="#{ 'Hello, $' + '{customerName}!' }"/>
</bean>
Note that in order for this trick to work it is vital that the '$' and the '{' be physically separated (in this case, on either side of a string concatenation).