Spring MVC Integration testing: type mismatch from injection from properties file

I hope you can help me with a problem I am having with running a Spring integration test using AbstractTransactionalSpringContextTests to wire my dependencies. After everything was wired correctly, I started getting some new errors telling me that some of the values injected read from .properties files were having a type mismatch. When the web application runs. these errors never appear.

This is the error I was getting:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: Error creating bean with name 'messageSource' defined in class path resource [siebel-test-context.xml]: Initialization of bean failed; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.TypeMismatchException: Failed to convert property value of type [java.lang.String] to required type [int] for property 'cacheSeconds'; nested exception is java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "${dcla.external.properties.cache.second}"
Caused by: org.springframework.beans.TypeMismatchException: Failed to convert property value of type [java.lang.String] to required type [int] for property 'cacheSeconds'; nested exception is java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "${dcla.external.properties.cache.second}"
Caused by: java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "${dcla.external.properties.cache.second}"
at java.lang.NumberFormatException.forInputString(NumberFormatException.java:48)
at java.lang.Integer.parseInt(Integer.java:468)
at java.lang.Integer.valueOf(Integer.java:547)
at java.lang.Integer.decode(Integer.java:908)
at org.springframework.util.NumberUtils.parseNumber(NumberUtils.java:146)
at org.springframework.beans.propertyeditors.CustomNumberEditor.setAsText(CustomNumberEditor.java:114)
at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.doConvertTextValue(TypeConverterDelegate.java:343)
at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.doConvertValue(TypeConverterDelegate.java:319)
at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.convertIfNecessary(TypeConverterDelegate.java:192)
at org.springframework.beans.TypeConverterDelegate.convertIfNecessary(TypeConverterDelegate.java:138)
at org.springframework.beans.BeanWrapperImpl.convertForProperty(BeanWrapperImpl.java:380)

In a properties file titled 'operations.properties' the value for ${dcla.external.properties.cache.second} is listed as:

dcla.external.properties.cache.second=120

Now, if I hard code the value in the Spring context configuration file, like this

<property name="cacheSeconds" value="120" />

....it will stop complaining about this value and then complain about another value which Spring says it can not convert from Date to String...

When the application runs on it's own, there is no need for a property editor. Can there be something I can do to get these mismatch errors to stop? Is there something I am doing wrong?

The error is indicating that Spring isn't substituting the ${} string correctly as it is treating it as a string, not a substitution. Are you confident about the configuration? It's a little hard to tell base on what you've posted but somewhere Spring doesn't know that it should do the substitution.

I was able to solve this by eliminating an extra property placeholder configurers and then setting up one property placeholder for all properties files.