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.