Introducing Spring Framework

Chapter 5 ■ Working with Collections and Custom Types
Listing 5-5. mydocuments-context.xml
Merging Collections
The Spring Framework also provides a merge mechanism for the collections. In other words, you can have another
bean of the same type with a different set of values and you can actually merge/join collections and avoid duplicates
or add more to a set of values. Let’s see an example. Imagine you have the typeDAO bean but you want to add more
entries that maybe could be in another XML configuration. This approach of merging collections can be beneficial
if you are required to have a template or a base where you need to join or inherit some values. See Listing 5-6 for a
merge example.
57