As of Spring Boot 2.7.6, the @ConfigurationProperties binding supports converting a string value into a Class object to specify some Java type. However, this shares the usual limitations of .class references, particularly including lack of support for generics. It would be convenient to be able to bind a Spring ResolvableType so that I could specify java.util.List<com.example.Foo> in my Boot configuration.
At the moment, I don't see a converter or a factory method in spring-core to create a ResolvableType from a string representation; I think this would need to be written (and I'm open to taking a try at it if the obvious stack implementation would work).
Comment From: snicoll
Thanks for the suggestion but I don't think us parsing a complex string structure to extra a generic type is something that we should offer out-of-the-box. While providing a class as a String in configuration properties can be useful in some cases if you wish to do so (Spring Boot tries to not offer such properties), a more advanced type definition is quite different.