I mistakenly started the discussion on the Issue Tracker.. well my understanding of reading the collection instance from the bean rather than replacing it is as follows

public class MyClass
{
 private List<String> list;

 public List<String> getList();

 public MyClass(){
 list = new ArrayList<String>();
 list.add("One");
 list.add("Two");
 }
}
<property name="list"><list><value>Three</value><list></property>

So it seems to me that after bean initialization the bean will be having One-Two-Three as the member of the list property.

Just wanted to know if this is exactly whats gonna happen ? because if this is the case, I feel is not the conventional behavior where setter is supposed to replace the property.