Introduction

The Configuration API is a simple but powerful API for handling configuration issues inside your application. It provides a standard mechanism for getting configuration values inside your application code. The Configuration API is only the public API your should be built upon. Besides the API you will need an implementation of the API. Currently there is one implementation for using Spring: The Cocoon Spring Configurator.

The Configuration API defines the Settings bean (org.apache.cocoon.configuration.Settings). You can use this bean to get configuration values for your application. Configuration values are stored in a key/value pair fashion (similar to the properties) and the settings object provides several methods to access this information.

Please note, that this is just the client API your code should rely on. The Configurator API does in no way define how the actual configuration takes place!

The org.apache.cocoon.configuration.MutableSettings class is a default implementation of the settings object. For example, this class can be used as a mock object for unit testing.

The org.apache.cocoon.configuration.PropertyHelper class contains various helper methods for dealing with properties and settings.

The org.apache.cocoon.configuration.PropertyProvider interface is an interface that can be used by implementations of the Configuration API to allow custom code to be executed for configuring a settings object.