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Concise Proxy Definitions

Especially when defining transactional proxies, you may end up with many similar proxy definitions. The use of parent and child bean definitions, along with inner bean definitions, can result in much cleaner and more concise proxy definitions.

First, we create a parent, template, bean definition for the proxy, as follows:

<bean id="txProxyTemplate" abstract="true"
		class="org.springframework.transaction.interceptor.TransactionProxyFactoryBean">
	<property name="transactionManager" ref="transactionManager"/>
	<property name="transactionAttributes">
		<props>
			<prop key="*">PROPAGATION_REQUIRED</prop>
		</props>
	</property>
</bean>

This is never instantiated itself, so it can actually be incomplete. Then, each proxy that needs to be created is a child bean definition, which wraps the target of the proxy as an inner bean definition, since the target is never used on its own anyway. The following example shows such a child bean:

<bean id="myService" parent="txProxyTemplate">
	<property name="target">
		<bean class="org.springframework.samples.MyServiceImpl">
		</bean>
	</property>
</bean>

You can override properties from the parent template. In the following example, we override the transaction propagation settings:

<bean id="mySpecialService" parent="txProxyTemplate">
	<property name="target">
		<bean class="org.springframework.samples.MySpecialServiceImpl">
		</bean>
	</property>
	<property name="transactionAttributes">
		<props>
			<prop key="get*">PROPAGATION_REQUIRED,readOnly</prop>
			<prop key="find*">PROPAGATION_REQUIRED,readOnly</prop>
			<prop key="load*">PROPAGATION_REQUIRED,readOnly</prop>
			<prop key="store*">PROPAGATION_REQUIRED</prop>
		</props>
	</property>
</bean>

Note that in the parent bean example, we explicitly marked the parent bean definition as being abstract by setting the abstract attribute to true, as described previously, so that it may not actually ever be instantiated. Application contexts (but not simple bean factories), by default, pre-instantiate all singletons. Therefore, it is important (at least for singleton beans) that, if you have a (parent) bean definition that you intend to use only as a template, and this definition specifies a class, you must make sure to set the abstract attribute to true. Otherwise, the application context actually tries to pre-instantiate it.