Load different properties for development and deployment

Question

I have a very common use case -- connect to different databases when my program is in development mode, in test mode, or in deployment mode.

The way I am doing it now, is I configure a data source, and pass it ${...} properties via bean:property tag.

However to get the ${...}, i am doing

<context:property-placeholder properties-ref="myProperties" />

and in the bottom of the xml config, I have

<beans profile=test>
   <util:properties id=myProperties>
   </util>
</beans>
<beans profile=dev,default>
   <util:properties id=myProperties>
</beans>
<beans profile=prod>
  <util:properties id="myProperties>
</beans>

This seems inefficient, overly verbose, and prone to error. All spring properties tutorials tell me that context:property-placeholder is Environment aware, and Environment is responsible for profiles so how do I simplify this? It is intuitive to me that there is a simpler way, I just can't figure it out.

Really, what I am looking for is to specify profile on context:properties-placeholder, or something like that.

Answer 1

I solved that problem once (a long time before Spring supports profiles): spring property substitution for test and production

nowadays a would still use property files but, but I would select them by profiles. There are a lot of ways to do this:

The simplest one is:

<context:property-placeholder
         location="classpath*:META-INF/spring/config-${spring.profiles.active}.properties" />

an other is:

<beans profile="normal">
    <context:property-placeholder 
             location="classpath*:META-INF/spring/config-normal.properties"/>
</beans>
<beans profile="test">    
      <context:property-placeholder
             location="classpath*:META-INF/spring/config-test.properties"/>
</beans>

The first approach has the drawback, that when more than one profile is activated then only the properties for the first profile gets loaded. I am not sure what will happen with the second approach when having more than one profiles.

For the first approach I found this solution, but I have not tested it:

<bean id="propertyConfigurer"
      class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
      <property name="locations">
        <list>
            <value>classpath*:META-INF/spring/*_${spring.profiles.active}.properties</value>
        </list>
      </property>
</bean>