Bean reference in Spring configuration file: which sintax?

Question

Working for some time with Spring I often had to do with bean reference.

I've always used this syntax to refer to other beans in my application:

<ref bean="referenced_bean_id"/>

but sometimes, in third party applications, I see that the following sintax is also used:

<ref bean="${bean.referenced_bean_id}"/>

I haven't yet figured out what the difference is. Can you explain it?

Answer 1

This is what we call as "Dynamic bean referencing" , here we use property place holders so that at runtime we can decide which bean to use depending on other application parameters

for further reference you can have a look here

• http://forum.spring.io/forum/spring-projects/container/10377-dynamic-bean-reference

And a similar thread here ,

• How to set dynamically a bean reference in Spring? Hope it helps!

Good luck!