Analysing spring bean definitions

Question

Our application exports its configuration as several sets of Spring beans.

I have no control over how it does this.

I want to write something that documents the dependencies between the configuration items defined in these beans. Note: these are dependencies at the application level, nothing to so with Spring dependencies (so we might have configuration items of type Actresses who have a dependency on certain items from the type Bishops, but - at the Spring bean level - this is merely that the value of a property in the Actress matches the value of a different property of the Bishop).

So I'd like to use some library or toolset that lets me load up a set of bean definition XML, iterate over them and the content of each, extract property values and so on.

From some googling, I can find ways of extending the parsing Spring does itself, but I don't want that - I want something I can run offline outside of the Spring-using app itself.

Can someone point me at some resources for doing this?

Answer 1

The closest thing I've heard of to this is Spring BeanDocs:

http://spring-beandoc.sourceforge.net/