How to access Spring context from a depending project?

Question

Suppose I have two projects:

ProjectA and ProjectB
ProjectA depends on ProjectB

And I have a context.xml locates at ProjectB/target/test-classes/context.xml. Now I need to loat the context from ProjectA. In projectB I have an accesser class:

Class ContextAccessor{
    ApplicationContext context = new
        ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("context.xml");

    public static ApplicationContext getContext(){
        return context;
    }
}

While in ProjectA, I'm trying to get the context using:

ContextAccessor.getContext();

but it throws an exception with message:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: IOException     parsing XML document from class path resource [context.xml]; nested exception is java.io.FileNotFoundException: class path resource [context.xml] cannot be opened because it does not exist
at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader.loadBeanDefinitions(XmlBeanDefinitionReader.java:341)
at 

Please give suggestions. Appreciation.

Answer 1

I finally solved this issue by using:

Class ContextAccessor{
    ApplicationContext context = new
        FileSystemXmlApplicationContext(this.getClass().getProtectionDomain().
        getCodeSource().getLocation().getPath());

    public static ApplicationContext getContext(){
        return context;
    }
}

Assuming the context is at ProjectB/target/classes/context.xml

Answer 2

You need to make sure that ProjectB (i suppose it's packaged as a jar) in ProjectA's classpath. refer here if you are using Maven, to understand how this can be done.

Once it's in class path you should be able create a context with the code given above. Also make sure the location of context.xml is correctly passed to the constructor, refer to JavaDoc for ClassPathXmlApplicationContext.

Answer 3

I think you haven't added ProjectB in project dependencies of ProjectA. Please add it and try again.