Configuration problem: Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for XML schema namespace

Question

I am facing a lot of issues one after the other. Let me note it down properly -

I am implementing Springframework cache and this was my original SpringCacheConfig.xml -

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xmlns:cache="http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache"
   xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
   xmlns:c="http://www.springframework.org/schema/c"
   xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
   xmlns:hz="http://www.hazelcast.com/schema/spring"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
                       http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache/spring-cache.xsd
                       http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd
                       http://www.hazelcast.com/schema/spring http://www.hazelcast.com/schema/spring/hazelcast-spring.xsd"> 

This was working fine in my laptop, but in the test VM, we were not able to download the XSD schema files from internet.

So I changed the schemalocations to classpath -

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
   xmlns:cache="http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache"
   xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
   xmlns:c="http://www.springframework.org/schema/c"
   xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"
   xmlns:hz="http://www.hazelcast.com/schema/spring"
   xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans classpath:spring-beans.xsd
                       http://www.springframework.org/schema/cache classpath:spring-cache.xsd
                       http://www.springframework.org/schema/context classpath:spring-context.xsd
                       http://www.hazelcast.com/schema/spring classpath:hazelcast-spring.xsd">

So now the XSD files were picked up. But the downloaded spring-context.xsd file has the following content -

<xsd:import namespace="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" schemaLocation="https://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-4.3.xsd"/>
<xsd:import namespace="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tool" schemaLocation="https://www.springframework.org/schema/tool/spring-tool-4.3.xsd"/>

So I have again moved them to classpath.

After these changes if I now execute our code, I am getting the following error -

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: 
Configuration problem: Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for XML schema namespace [http://www.springframework.org/schema/context]
    Offending resource: class path resource [SpringCacheConfig.xml]

I tried to solve this problem by many previous posts, but not able to.

The pom is already including spring-context related jars -

<dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
        <version>${springframework.version}</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
        <version>${springframework.version}</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-context-support</artifactId>
        <version>${springframework.version}</version>
</dependency>

These jars are not packaged within the main jar, but are available at

modules/system/layers/thirdparty/org/springframework/main/spring-context-4.3.1.RELEASE.jar.

But why the jar couldn't be found?

I also tried the shade plugin, but still dependency jars are not included - How to create spring-based executable jar with maven?

What else should I think about?

I don't have the META-INF/spring.handlers etc Spring related files within the jar. Can it be the issue?

Answer 1

I solved the problem by creating a META-INF directory and putting the spring.handlers and spring.schemas files into it. I extracted all the spring jars, some of them have these spring.handlers and spring.schemas files. I concatenated the contents of those files and put them in META-INF.

But surprisingly, the project was working in eclipse, but not in VM. In eclipse project, I don't need to copy the spring.handlers and spring.schemas files in the jar's META-INF directory - it works without them. But in VM I need to copy the files! May be in eclipse these files are referred from .m2, since those jars are in the classpath? Any idea?

Thanks