Spring Web Application, loading classes from classpath

Recently i had to break my big Spring Portlet Application into smaller pieces and move some of the code to shared library so that it can be used by multiple web application. Actually in my case Portlet Skin, which is part of wps.war needed access to same beans as that of my portlet.

What i did to solve this problem is i created a new Java Project and moved my DAO classes along with the Spring configuration for DAO classes to that java project, the jar file built by that java project would go in shared lib. Since the spring configuration files were copied to root of the shared library my Skin could load those classes by using ClassPathXmlApplicationContext like this


new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(new String[]{"dao.xml","dao1.xml","dao2.xml"})


But how do i include the dao.xmls while creating WebApplicationContext. In Spring Portlet MVC framework the org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener is used for reading value of contextConfigLocation Web Application Context parameter and then reads all those Spring configuration files into Web Application COntext. Normally WebApplication Context looks for the configuration files in WEB-INF directory. In my case dao.xml is not part of web application so it was throwing file not found error.

I was able to solve that problem by appending classpath: instead of file name. When i do that the Spring framework starts using ClasspathResourceLoader instead of WebApplicationResourceLoader for loading configuration file. And ClasspathResourceLoader is capable of reading files from the classpath, which is shared lib

<context-param>
<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
<param-value>classpath:dao.xml,classpath:dao1.xml,classpath:dao2.xml</param-value>
</context-param>