I was surprised to find that Spring framework doesn’t have Yaml-based PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer to load nested properties from Yaml property file. After some investigation turned out that instead of writing YamlPropertyPlaceholderConfigurer it is sufficient to write Yaml implementation of PropertiesPersister.

Here’ show your applicationContext.xml (snippet) will look

    <bean id="propertyConfigurer" class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.PropertyPlaceholderConfigurer">
        <property name="locations">
            <value>file:///C:/foo/properties.yaml</value>
        </property>
        <property name="propertiesPersister" ref="persister"></property>
    </bean>
    <bean id="persister" class="com.foo.utils.YamlPropertiesPersister"></bean>

And here’s bare-bone PropertiesPersister implementation using SnakeYaml as parser

public class YamlPropertiesPersister implements PropertiesPersister {
    @Override
    public void load(Properties props, InputStream is) throws IOException {
        load(props, new InputStreamReader(is));
    }

    /**
     * We want to traverse map representing Yaml object and each time we will find String:String value pair we want to
     * save it as Property. As we are going deeper into map we generate a compound key as path-like String
     *
     * @param props
     * @param reader
     * @throws IOException
     * @see org.springframework.util.PropertiesPersister#load(java.util.Properties, java.io.Reader)
     */
    @Override
    public void load(Properties props, Reader reader) throws IOException {
        Yaml yaml = CollectorUtils.instanceOfYaml();
        Map<String, Object> map = (Map<String, Object>) yaml.load(reader);
        // now we can populate supplied props
        assignProperties(props, map, null);
    }

    /**
     * @param props
     * @param map
     */
    public void assignProperties(Properties props, Map<String, Object> map, String path) {
        for (Entry<String, Object> entry : map.entrySet()) {
            String key = entry.getKey();
            if (StringUtils.isNotEmpty(path))
                key = path + "." + key;
            Object val = entry.getValue();
            if (val instanceof String) {
                // see if we need to create a compound key
                props.put(key, val);
            } else if (val instanceof Map) {
                assignProperties(props, (Map<String, Object>) val, key);
            }
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void store(Properties props, OutputStream os, String header) throws IOException {
        throw new NotImplementedException("Current implementation is a read-only");
    }

    @Override
    public void store(Properties props, Writer writer, String header) throws IOException {
        throw new NotImplementedException("Current implementation is a read-only");
    }

    @Override
    public void loadFromXml(Properties props, InputStream is) throws IOException {
        throw new NotImplementedException("Use DefaultPropertiesPersister if you want to read/write XML");
    }

    @Override
    public void storeToXml(Properties props, OutputStream os, String header) throws IOException {
        throw new NotImplementedException("Use DefaultPropertiesPersister if you want to load/store to XML");
    }

    @Override
    public void storeToXml(Properties props, OutputStream os, String header, String encoding) throws IOException {
        throw new NotImplementedException("Use DefaultPropertiesPersister if you want to read/write XML");
    }
}

And as an added bonus, here’s how you create Yaml instance with SnakeYaml

    public static Yaml instanceOfYaml() {
        DumperOptions options = new DumperOptions();
        options.setDefaultFlowStyle(DumperOptions.FlowStyle.BLOCK);
        options.setDefaultScalarStyle(ScalarStyle.DOUBLE_QUOTED);
        final Yaml yaml = new Yaml(new Loader(), new Dumper(options), new Resolver() {
            /**
             * @see org.yaml.snakeyaml.resolver.Resolver#addImplicitResolvers()
             */
            @Override
            protected void addImplicitResolvers() {
                addImplicitResolver(Tag.BOOL, BOOL, "yYnNtTfFoO");
                // disable resolving of floats and integers
                // addImplicitResolver(Tags.FLOAT, FLOAT, "-+0123456789.");
                // addImplicitResolver(Tag.INT, INT, "-+0123456789");
                addImplicitResolver(Tag.MERGE, MERGE, "<");
                addImplicitResolver(Tag.NULL, NULL, "~nN\0");
                addImplicitResolver(Tag.NULL, EMPTY, null);
                addImplicitResolver(Tag.TIMESTAMP, TIMESTAMP, "0123456789");
                addImplicitResolver(Tag.VALUE, VALUE, "=");
            }
        });
        return yaml;
    }