title: Externalise properties working but not overriding existing default value in internal properties
body: <p>I have a multi module maven project, each module is a jar with its own context file and a set of default properties bundled inside the JAR.</p>
  
  <p>Basically in a core module I have this : </p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;bean
      class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer"&gt;
      &lt;property name="locations"&gt;
          &lt;list&gt;
              &lt;value&gt;classpath:core.properties&lt;/value&gt;
          &lt;/list&gt;
      &lt;/property&gt;
      &lt;property name="ignoreUnresolvablePlaceholders" value="true" /&gt;
  &lt;/bean&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now i have another module that build the application by loading all relevant XML and adding its own configuration file</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;import resource="classpath*:core-context.xml" /&gt;
  
  
  &lt;bean
      class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer"&gt;
      &lt;property name="locations"&gt;
          &lt;list&gt;
              &lt;value&gt;classpath:application.properties&lt;/value&gt;
              &lt;value&gt;#{systemEnvironment['foo_bar']}&lt;/value&gt;
          &lt;/list&gt;
      &lt;/property&gt;
      &lt;property name="ignoreUnresolvablePlaceholders" value="true" /&gt;
  &lt;/bean&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>What happen is that all my configurations files are working fine except the one that has default value. I can't override them in application.properties or in the file pointed by the system variable.</p>
  
  <p>I tryed to force the configuration file using the <code>spring.config.location</code>. I do see in the tomcat the message saying that I have the configuration <code>-Dspring.config.file=file:///...</code> (windows path). But spring is totally ignoring it (no message in the logs from Spring).</p>
  
  <p>I tried to switch to PropertySources class without more success.</p>
  
  <p>I'd very like to not have to remove all default properties and put everything in an external file, because lot of parameters are internal to the application and don't have any value for a client.</p>
  
  <p>So what I am missing here ? </p>