Reason to break PropertiesFactoryBean contract from 2.5 to 3.0 [SPR-7428]

[spring-projects-issues]

Stéphane Nicoll opened SPR-7428 and commented

I am wondering what the rationale would be to break PropertiesFactoryBean contract in 3.0

The protected method createInstance is now removed and since the class has only final fields, the class could just as be final as well. If that's what you intended, please make the class final but if you didn't, providing a backward compat way would be much appreciated.

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Affects: 3.0.3

Referenced from: commits b054ca4

[spring-projects-issues]

Juergen Hoeller commented

Note that PropertiesFactoryBean's superclass, PropertiesLoaderSupport, has several non-final protected methods such as loadProperties and mergeProperties which may get overridden.

In any case, I've reintroduced the "Object createInstance()" template method in deprecated form, in addition to a non-deprecated "Properties createProperties()" template method.

The problem with createInstance() is that it returns Object. That was ok with a plain FactoryBean but not with a 3.0-style FactoryBean<Properties>. Note that createInstance() must return a Properties Object at runtime now.

Juergen