Reading Bean definitions without validating

I'm building IDE support for Spring and have a problem with trying to obtain a list of the beans defined in the configuration file(s) if the relevant classes do not exist yet. (This is for a design time UI so it is entirely possible that the compiled classes are not available)
Using XMLBeanFactory the XmlBeanDefinitionReader throws ClassNotFound exceptions for the defined beans.
Is there an API to provide me with a non-validated parsed representation of the bean configuration or will I have to do this manually?
This is using Spring 1.2 at the moment.
Thanks

Hope this may help you:

http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=16924