How to create a custom Spring PropertySource that depends on a Spring Bean

Question

I'm attempting to use the spring-cloud stack for a project that would use Zuul. In my organization we have a custom configuration stack that is xml-based and does property composition and hierarchical overrides. Because of the way this configuration is handled, I've struggled to create a PropertySource for it.

My custom PropertySource must use my Config bean, but because the PropertySources are initialized during the bootstrapping of spring boot, the application context is not fully initialized yet and I can't get to my custom Bean that exposes our xml-based configuration system.

@ConfigurationProperties appears to be entirely biased toward .properties and .yaml files. The Config bean is initialized in an ApplicationContextInitializer. Is there a way to delay the resolution of the ConfigurationProperties within the various services so I can construct my custom property source using my Config bean after it is initialized?

Solution 1

I originally attempted (well before asking the question) to create a custom PropertySourceLocator in my config (as mentioned by Dave Syer and well documented in the link he gave) and register it with my own spring.factories (Again, demonstrated in the helpful link given by Spencer Gibb in the comment.) The problem is that my property source needs to be configured after some work that is done in an ApplicationContextInitializer and the property sources all seem to be resolved before that occurs (at least those wired in as a factory for org.springframework.cloud.bootstrap.BootstrapConfiguration). I guess I hinted at this by stating that I needed a particular bean in my PropertySource that I couldn't get from the ApplicationContext at the time.

Anyway, to get around that, I am now registering the property source in an PriorityOrdered ApplicationContextInitializer to take place after another one that initializes my config object. Something like: context.getEnvironment().getPropertySources().addFirst(myPropertySource);

This seems to get my property source into the environment at the correct time and allows me to perform customization of the context before hand as needed.

Solution 2

In Spring Cloud you would need to register some BootstrapConfiguration (per the user guide: http://projects.spring.io/spring-cloud/spring-cloud.html#customizing-bootstrap-property-sources) that has a PropertySourceLocator bean. It shouldn't be any harder than that.

P.S. @ConfigurationProperties is not biased toward .properties and .yaml files - it binds to the Environment which knows nothing about file formats.