Reading from properties file in spring

I have a web application in which I'm using spring MVC. I have defined few constants in sample.properties file. spring-servlet is the servlet that gets initialized for all urls in my app. spring-servlet:

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context" xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation=" http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.0.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-2.0.xsd"> <context:property-placeholder location="classpath:sample.properties"/> </beans> 

In one of my java classes I access the value of one of the properties like this:

package com.sample; import com.google.gson.JsonArray; import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Value; import org.springframework.stereotype.Component; @Component public class Validator { @Value("${credit}") String credits; private static final Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger(Validator.class); public void checkRating() { LOG.debug(credits); } } 

sample.properties:

credit=[{"duration":15,"credit":10},{"duration":30,"credit":20}] 

When Validator is called from a controller, it just logs it as ${credit} in my log file. I dont get its value. Similarly, if I put an integer / floating point number in the properties file, I get an error saying it cannot be cast into integer / float. Am I missing any configuration?