Is it bad practice for a spring-based jar project to provide a bean configuration file?

If you have a library containing Spring beans that need to be wired together before an application can use them, does it make sense to include any sort of bean configuration file in the JAR (such as the /META-INF directory)? The idea is to give the application the option开发者_运维问答 of importing this into its master Spring context configuration.

There may be more than one way to wire these beans, so I could provide a bean configuration file for each of the standard ways in which you'd typically wire them together.

Or, do I force the application to wire these up explicitly?

If it helps, the specifics of my problem involve a library I created to encapsulate our product's persistence layer. It contains Service, DAO and model beans. The DAO implementations currently use Hibernate (this probably won't change). Some of the DAO implementations need different kinds of Strategy beans injected into them (database encryption logic), depending on the type of database we are deploying on (MySQL vs SQL Server, etc). So we have potentially a few different configuration scenarios. I could also provide datasource bean configurations, relying on property substitution at the app level to inject all the particulars needed by the datasource.

Thanks for your input!

In this case, it's a good idea to provide some beans files, either as examples for documentation purposes, or as fully-fledged files ready for including into a wider context.

If your beans' wiring can get complex, then you shouldn't really leave it entirely up to the library client to figure it out.

This is more of a documentation and education task, really.