Programming Tutorials

How to use set, get basic and nested properties for Spring framework

By: Saravanan in Java Tutorials on 2009-10-03  

In this tutorial we are going to see how to use set, get basic and nested
properties for spring frame work. set and get properties are done using the
setPropertyValue(s) getPropertyValue(s) methods that both come with a couple of
overloaded variants.

Examples of properties

Expression:

*name
*account.name
*account[2]

name Indicates the property name corresponding to the methods getName() or isName() and setName()

account.name Indicates the nested property name of the property account corresponding e.g. to the methods getAccount().setName() or getAccount().getName()

account[2] Indicates the third element of the indexed property account. Indexed properties can be oftype array, list or other natural ordered collection

we can some examples of working with the BeanWrapper to get and set properties.

Consider the following two classes:

public class Company
 {
  private String name;
  private Employee MD;
  public String getName()
  {
   return this.name;
  }
  public void setName(String name)
  {
   this.name = name;
  }
  public Employee getMD()
  {
   return this.MD;
  }
  public void setMD(Employee MD)
  {
   this.MD = MD;
  }
 }

public class Employee
 {
  private float salary;
  public float getSalary()
  {
   return salary;
  }
  public void setSalary(float salary)
  {
   this.salary = salary;
  }
}

Now we are going to see how to retrieve and manipulate some of the properties of instantiated: Companies and Employees

Company c = new Company();
BeanWrapper bwComp = BeanWrapperImpl(c);

// setting the company name...
bwComp.setPropertyValue("name", "Company Inc.");

// we can also be done like this:
PropertyValue v = new PropertyValue("name", "Company Inc.");
bwComp.setPropertyValue(v);

// now we can create the director and tie it to the company:
Employee mathew = new Employee();
BeanWrapper bwmathew = BeanWrapperImpl(mathew);
bwJim.setPropertyValue("name", "mathew Hyden");
bwComp.setPropertyValue("MD", mathew);

// retrieving the salary of the MD through the company
Float salary = (Float)bwComp.getPropertyValue("MD.salary");