Just did a little refactoring to achieve this:

• applicationConfigs which are not likely to be changed in production are on the classpath
• applicationConfigs which are likely to be changed in production are in the WEB-INF

Therefore you find the config of the Dao's now in

/geonetwork-persistence-ebrim/src/main/resources/applicationContext-persistence.xml

I did this to avoid a lot of duplicate application configs in the test and WEB-INF directories.