Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for element 'flow'

Question

I am developing a spring webflow (2.0.7) project using SpringSource Tool Suite. I am trying to setup a basic flow.

My someflow.xml looks like this:

    <flow xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow"  
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow
                              http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow/spring-webflow-2.0.xsd">

             <!- view-state declarations -->
    </flow>

On STS tool(Spring IDE on eclipse), I see a warning message near the flow schemaLocation:

Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for element 'flow' of schema namespace 'http:// www.springframework.org/schema/webflow'

Then when tomcat starts up, I get the error

org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem: Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for XML schema namespace [http://www.springframework.org/schema/webflow] Offending resource: ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/flows/someflow.xml]

• I googled a while and some posts suggested that the problem is spring-webflow jars not being in class path. In my case, springsource tool created the template and all jars are in place. I manually checked them as well. So that can't be the issue

• One of the suggestions in this post http://forum.springsource.org/archive/index.php/t-49098.html was to splice the jar! That can't be a solution, but I tried to see if it fixes it. But no.

Stuck now.. Did anyone else face this issue?

Answer 1

if you are using eclipse,please provide the appresource path name,right click on your test case select Run as --> Run Configurations --> click on the Classpath tab and copy the below line and give the full path name of your property file location. appResourcePath = ../../environment-dev.properties).

Answer 2

I've had similar issues before and it usually boiled down to the jar missing from the built war. Can you open up the war you are using and check that the webflow jar is in the /WEB-INF/lib directory?

If you are using Maven to do your builds, check your dependency settings for webflow as well.