Spring @Controllers declared in the root application context

Spring web applications have two context - the web co开发者_C百科ntext (child) and the root context (parent). If @Controller beans are defined in dispatcher-servlet.xml (the web context) everything is fine.

But if the controller beans are defined in the parent context (applicationContext.xml), then the controllers are not recognized - i.e. their mappings are not configured, so when you try to open /foo/bar defined in such controller, the path is not found.

The question is: how to make the controller mappings to be parsed no matter where the beans are defined.

P.S. I know I can move the declarations to the child context, but I don't want to do that for reasons beyond the scope of this question.

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DefaultAnnotationHandlerMapping has a detectHandlersInAncestorContexts property that enables the desired behaviour.