title: Defining a list in a Spring application context file
body: <p>Can you create a List in a Spring application-context.xml file without using the <code>&lt;list&gt;</code> element?</p>
  
  <p>I have a bean whose constructor takes a <code>Collection</code> object and I want to pass the entire list through the "value" attribute.  The reason is that this value comes from a .properties file and you can't define a list in a .properties file.</p>
  
  <p>I want to do something like this...is it possible?</p>
  
  <p>MyClass.java:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public class MyClass{
    public MyClass(Collection&lt;String&gt; collection){ /* ... */ }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>application-context.xml:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;bean name="myBean" class="com.company.MyClass"&gt;
    &lt;constructor-arg value="${the.value}" /&gt;
  &lt;/bean&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>.properties file:</p>
  
  <pre><code>the.value=item1,item2,item3
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>