Let's suggest that I have a bean defined in Spring: <bean id="neatBean" class="com..." abstract="true">...</bean> Then we have many clients, each of which have slightly different configuration for their 'neatBean'. The old way we would do it was to have a new file for each client (e.g., clientX_NeatFeature.xml) that contained a bunch of beans for this client (these are hand-edited and part of the code base): <bean id="clientXNeatBean" parent="neatBean"> <property id="whatever" value="something"/> </bean> Now, I want to have a UI where we can edit and redefine a client's neatBean on the fly. My question is: given a neatBean, and a UI that can 'override' properties of this bean, what would be a straightforward way to serialize this to an XML file as we do [manually] today? For example, if the user set property whatever to be "17" for client Y, I'd want to generate: <bean id="clientYNeatBean" parent="neatBean"> <property id="whatever" value="17"/> </bean> Note that moving this configuration to a different format (e.g., database, other-schema'd-xml) is an option, but not really an answer to the question at hand.