why do I need the prefix 'batch:' in my spring beans

spring, spring-batch, xml, xml-namespaces

Solution

`batch` is the alias in your XML file for the `http://www.springframework.org/schema/batch` namespace. You'll have something like this at the beggining of your XML:

xmlns:batch="http://www.springframework.org/schema/batch" 

This means that whenever you're prefixing an element with `batch:`, you're specifying that the element is the one Spring defines. This is necessary to clear out possible ambiguities (there might be other frameworks around defining the `<job>` element).

It is possible to define a default namespace for all elements in the XML document, so that if no namespace is prefixed, it'll be the one that the declaration is referring to. This default namespace is defined with the `xmlns="..."` attribute, and is usually assigned to the `http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans` namespace (where the `<beans>` element and many more of the basic types reside).

You could either:

1) Change `batch` to something shorter such as `b` if you want to clean up

<beans ... xmlns:b="http://www.springframework.org/schema/batch">
    ...
    <b:job></b:job>
    ...
</beans>

2) Make `batch` the default namespace (with `xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/batch"`) and use the `beans` namespace and others when needed. You could even declare all your batch elements in a separate xml file with this namespace as default, and `<beans:import>` it in your main `applicationContext.xml`.

<beans:beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/batch" 
     xmlns:beans="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans">

    <job>...</job>
    <job>...</job>

</beans:beans>

Problem

Original source