Is it possible to turn off XML Schema Validation on webapp startup?

[mraible]

I'm looking to optimize the time it takes to load up my web application that depends on Spring. One of the suggestions I've heard is to turn off XML Schema validation. Is this easy to do? If so, how? I received the following suggestion from Dan Diephouse, but I'm not directly interacting with the ClassPathXmlApplicationContext - I'm using the ContextLoaderListener and AbstractTransactionalDataSourceSpringContextTests.

    @Override
    protected void initBeanDefinitionReader(XmlBeanDefinitionReader reader) {
        super.initBeanDefinitionReader(reader);    
        reader.setValidationModeName(XmlBeanDefinitionReader.VALIDATION_NONE);
    }

[Steve O]

Matt,

I think one way you can speed up the loading of your application is to set

<beans xmlns=...
default-lazy-init="true">
...
</beans>

in your beans definition.

This is not very helpful during development though - you won't know if there are bean definition errors at startup.

Hope that helps,

Steve O

[Jörg Heinicke]

The default ApplicationContext implementation used for web applications and by ContextLoader is the XmlWebApplicationContext, but you can change this by setting contextClass context parameter in web.xml. With this change you can sub-class XmlWebApplicationContext and overwrite appropriate methods to apply your changes. I don't know if there is a more direct way to switch off validation.

Joerg

[dandiep]

It'd be nice if Spring looked for a system property here instead of forcing people to subclass things...

[Jörg Heinicke]

It'd be nice if Spring looked for a system property here ...

The fact that I'm not aware of one does not mean it does not exist. My approach was only one that should work. You can also raise an enhancement request at Spring's issue tracker.

Joerg