How to read spring beans definitions

Question

I need to read the bean definitions from the Spring context file, practically reading what is inside the XML. I do not want to instantiate beans, I just want to read the contents of the file.

While I can write a parser, I suppose Spring is already doing this. What classes does it use (I run the related XmlBeanDefinitionReader classes, but I'm not sure how to use them)?

How to load XML into bean definitions using Spring classes?

I am using Spring 2.0.

Thank!

Answer 1

XmlBeanFactory, ListableBeanFactory beans BeanDefintion getBeanDefinition (beanName)