Spring Boot application.properties lifecyle

Question

I have a large Spring web application, dating back several years. I need to update it to Spring Boot (corporate requirement). I'm well on my way - it starts (!), although there are some issues with properties being injected, which causes the app to fail.

Specifically, there are three huge config files per profile, eg qa_config.properties, qa_ehcache.xml, qa_monitoring.properties. At present I only care about qa_config.properties, which I have renamed to Spring Boot's preferred name, application-qa.properties, and application-qa_monitoring.properties

The application has a number of classes annotated with @Named (from the javax.ws.rs-api ) which are loaded early - so early that I need to inject properties in the constuctor:

package com.domain.app;

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Value;

import javax.inject.Named;

@Named
public class Foo {

    // Cant use @Value here, it is not yet in the context
    protected String bar; // lives in application-qa.properties
    protected String qux; // lives in application-qa_monitoring.properties

    public Foo(@Value("${application.property.named.bar}") String bar,
        @Value("${monitoring.property.named.qux}") String qux) {

        this.bar = bar;
        this.qux = qux;

        doSomeWork();

    }
}

Properties files:

#application-qa.properties
application.property.named.bar=something

and

#application-qa_monitoring.properties
monitoring.property.named.qux=another_thing

My problem: I want to have both application-qa.properties and application-qa_monitoring.properties in context as soon as possible, and before the @Named classes are loaded.

To achieve this, I am running the application with an active profile of qa, which successfully adds that set of properties into the context.

I added this line to the application.properties file, to ensure that the other properties are loaded:

spring.profiles.include=${spring.profiles.active}_monitoring.properties

When I run the Spring Boot app, the output tells me

The following profiles are active: qa_monitoring.properties,qa

When debugging the Foo class, the value of bar is correct

But, the value of qux is null.

Am I missing something about the order in which properties files are loaded? I would have thought that the include line in application.properties would be sufficient to "flatten" the two files very early on, if one is in context, so both should be available?

What I could do instead is just throw all the vars in the two properties files into one, the application-qa.properties but I'd like, if possible, to keep them seperate and as close to the original structure as possible.

Answer 1

Thanks to pvpkiran and Andy Brown.

My application.properties file should have read

spring.profiles.include=${spring.profiles.active}_monitoring

ie, just adding another profile, in this case qa_monitoring - Spring automagically adds the application- prefix and the .properties suffix