 <p>There is a feature called 'collection merging' that does exactly this. See section 3.3.3.4.1. "Collection merging" in the <a href="http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/3.0.x/reference/beans.html" rel="nofollow">Spring documentation</a> or the <a href="http://greybeardedgeek.net/2008/04/23/spring-collection-merging/" rel="nofollow">2008 blog post (with an example) that I wrote on the subject</a>.</p>