Mulitple PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer configurations

I ran into an issue today when adding a second Spring propertyConfigerer to my application build. My application uses a multi module Maven build system.

A little background on the Maven config: The modules are configured with a core, a web, and a parent. The web module depends on the parent. I originally had a single propertyConfiguer in the web project and it worked without any issues.

Yesterday, I added a propertyConfigurer to the core project to control some email settings. The configurer works fine when I run the Maven build for only the core module. However, when I run the build and tests from the web module, I was receiving the following error:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: Error registering bean with name 'userSearch' defined in URL [file:/"path to my applicationContext-wicket.xml file"]: Could not resolve placeholder 'ldap.basedn'


This error is referring to the ldap properties file I have configured in my web project, and I knew that the configuration for the web project had not changed.

After doing some research, I found this post on the spring forums and the fix mentioned worked perfectly.

The fix involves editing the first application context file that is loaded. For my build, this is the core module because it is the lowest level in my build. My updated applicationContext.xml file in my core project looks like this

1.     <bean id="mailProps" class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">

2.         <property name="location" value="classpath:mail.properties"/>

3.         <property name="ignoreUnresolvablePlaceholders" value="true"/>

4.     </bean>	

After making the change to set ignoreUnresolvablePlaceholders=true, my build and tests completed successfully.

I found another forum post that mentions a different fix, but I did not try it out because the first fix worked for me. But here is the link in case it helps.