Introducing Spring Framework

Chapter 5
Working with Collections and
Custom Types
You need to start adding some useful data and some special types to your Spring application. In this chapter, you will
learn how to interact with data using collections within the Spring Framework.
So far, you have declared several beans that hold your type of documents, but there should be a better way to do
that. I know that you are thinking of some kind of database or some other local storage or even a flat file, but let’s see
how Spring can help you to define your types in a different way, by using them as a collection.
List, Map, and Properties
First, let’s modify the Java classes so you can get an idea of what you will actually need in your final context
configuration as shown in Listing 5-1.
Listing 5-1. DocumentRepository.java
package com.apress.isf.spring.data;
import java.util.List;
import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import com.apress.isf.java.model.Document;
public class DocumentRepository implements DocumentDAO {
private static final Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(DocumentRepository.class);
private List documents = null;
public List getDocuments() {
return documents;
}
public void setDocuments(List documents) {
this.documents = documents;
}
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