Abstract bean - DTD problem?

[jonmor]

I've looed through the forum and not really seen a definitive answer to this one. It's a bit of a puzzle. I have the following in my applicationContext.xml file, to declare an abstract bean which I can inherit from:

<bean id="baseDAO" abstract="true">
<property name="sessionFactory">
<ref local="sessionFactory"/>
</property>
</bean>

At the top of the file, there's the usual:

<!DOCTYPE beans PUBLIC "-//SPRING//DTD BEAN//EN" "http://www.springframework.org/dtd/spring-beans.dtd">

Now, when I check the file for validity with JEdit, there's no problem. However, when I try to run a unit test with JUnit, I get the error which has been reported here before, and the test fails:

org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Attribute "abstract" must be declared for element type "bean".

Why would this be occurring? Is there some way an obsolete DTD could be being used by JUnit, in which case where is it likely to be?

[ojolly]

Eventually, the problem may come from the entity resolver which uses the .dtd bundled with spring.jar. Can you check which version of spring*.jar you have and if there's any old .dtd which could reside in your classpath ?

Olivier

[jonmor]

Yes, well spotted! In fact, what seems to have happened is that my Maven project.xml file contained a dependency for an older version of Spring, from which I assume it was taking the DTD. I'm still surprised it would take precedence over the DTD explicitly pointed to in the DOCTYPE declaration.

Haven't confirmed this yet but I'll report back when I do.

[Colin Sampaleanu]

Yes, well spotted! In fact, what seems to have happened is that my Maven project.xml file contained a dependency for an older version of Spring, from which I assume it was taking the DTD. I'm still surprised it would take precedence over the DTD explicitly pointed to in the DOCTYPE declaration.

Haven't confirmed this yet but I'll report back when I do.

The entity resolver maps the http url location to a local classpath version. So the older classpath version will end up being used. The whole point is not to go to the net unless it can't be found locally.

Now I've always been a proponent of versioning the dtd's, but there's never quite been enough agreement on this to go ahead and do it.