Java XML validation against XSD Schema

Question

private void validateXML(DOMSource source) throws Exception {
    URL schemaFile = new URL("http://www.csc.liv.ac.uk/~valli/modules.xsd");
    SchemaFactory schemaFactory = SchemaFactory.newInstance(XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_INSTANCE_NS_URI);
    Schema schema = schemaFactory.newSchema(schemaFile);

    Validator validator = schema.newValidator();
    DOMResult result = new DOMResult();
    try {
        validator.validate(source, result); 
        System.out.println("is valid");
    } catch (SAXException e) {
        System.out.println("not valid because " + e.getLocalizedMessage());
    }
}

But this returns an error saying: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No SchemaFactory that implements the schema language specified by: http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema -instance could be loaded

Is this a problem with my code or with the actual xsd file?

Answer 1

That error means that your installed Java doesn't have any classes that can parse XMLSchema files, so it's not a problem with the schema or your code.

I'm pretty sure recent JREs have the appropriate classes by default, so can you get us the output of java -version ?

---

Update:

You're using the wrong XMLContants string. You want: XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_NS_URI

Answer 2

Those files are based on the underlying system. I had the same issue when I was programming a project for Android. I found that I had to use Xerces-for-Android to solve my problem.

The following worked for me for validation on Android, if your code relates to Android perhaps it will help, if it doesn't then perhaps the approach will help you with your underlying system:

1. Create a validation utility.
2. Get both the xml and xsd into file on the android OS and use the validation utility against it.
3. Use Xerces-For-Android to do the validation.

Android does support some packages which we can use, I created my xml validation utility based on: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/xml/validation/package-summary.html

My initial sandbox testing was pretty smooth with java, then I tried to port it over to Dalvik and found that my code did not work. Some things just aren't supported the same with Dalvik, so I made some modifications.

I found a reference to xerces for android, so I modified my sandbox test of ( the following doesn't work with android, the example after this does ):

import java.io.File;

import javax.xml.XMLConstants;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder;
import javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.Source;
import javax.xml.transform.dom.DOMSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;
import javax.xml.validation.Schema;
import javax.xml.validation.SchemaFactory;
import javax.xml.validation.Validator;

import org.w3c.dom.Document;

/**
 * A Utility to help with xml communication validation.
 */
public class XmlUtil {

    /**
     * Validation method. 
     * Base code/example from: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/xml/validation/package-summary.html
     * 
     * @param xmlFilePath The xml file we are trying to validate.
     * @param xmlSchemaFilePath The schema file we are using for the validation. This method assumes the schema file is valid.
     * @return True if valid, false if not valid or bad parse. 
     */
    public static boolean validate(String xmlFilePath, String xmlSchemaFilePath) {

        // parse an XML document into a DOM tree
        DocumentBuilder parser = null;
        Document document;

        // Try the validation, we assume that if there are any issues with the validation
        // process that the input is invalid.
        try {
            // validate the DOM tree
            parser = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().newDocumentBuilder();
            document = parser.parse(new File(xmlFilePath));

            // create a SchemaFactory capable of understanding WXS schemas
            SchemaFactory factory = SchemaFactory.newInstance(XMLConstants.W3C_XML_SCHEMA_NS_URI);

            // load a WXS schema, represented by a Schema instance
            Source schemaFile = new StreamSource(new File(xmlSchemaFilePath));
            Schema schema = factory.newSchema(schemaFile);

            // create a Validator instance, which can be used to validate an instance document
            Validator validator = schema.newValidator();
            validator.validate(new DOMSource(document));
        } catch (Exception e) {
            // Catches: SAXException, ParserConfigurationException, and IOException.
            return false;
        }     

        return true;
    }
}

The above code had to be modified some to work with xerces for android ( http://gc.codehum.com/p/xerces-for-android/ ). You need SVN to get the project, the following are some crib notes:

download xerces-for-android
    download silk svn (for windows users) from http://www.sliksvn.com/en/download
        install silk svn (I did complete install)
        Once the install is complete, you should have svn in your system path.
        Test by typing "svn" from the command line.
        I went to my desktop then downloaded the xerces project by:
            svn checkout http://xerces-for-android.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ xerces-for-android-read-only
        You should then have a new folder on your desktop called xerces-for-android-read-only

With the above jar (Eventually I'll make it into a jar, just copied it directly into my source for quick testing. If you wish to do the same, you can making the jar quickly with Ant ( http://ant.apache.org/manual/using.html )), I was able to get the following to work for my xml validation:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

import mf.javax.xml.transform.Source;
import mf.javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;
import mf.javax.xml.validation.Schema;
import mf.javax.xml.validation.SchemaFactory;
import mf.javax.xml.validation.Validator;
import mf.org.apache.xerces.jaxp.validation.XMLSchemaFactory;

import org.xml.sax.SAXException;

/**
 * A Utility to help with xml communication validation.
 */public class XmlUtil {

    /**
     * Validation method. 
     * 
     * @param xmlFilePath The xml file we are trying to validate.
     * @param xmlSchemaFilePath The schema file we are using for the validation. This method assumes the schema file is valid.
     * @return True if valid, false if not valid or bad parse or exception/error during parse. 
     */
    public static boolean validate(String xmlFilePath, String xmlSchemaFilePath) {

        // Try the validation, we assume that if there are any issues with the validation
        // process that the input is invalid.
        try {
            SchemaFactory  factory = new XMLSchemaFactory();
            Source schemaFile = new StreamSource(new File(xmlSchemaFilePath));
            Source xmlSource = new StreamSource(new File(xmlFilePath));
            Schema schema = factory.newSchema(schemaFile);
            Validator validator = schema.newValidator();
            validator.validate(xmlSource);
        } catch (SAXException e) {
            return false;
        } catch (IOException e) {
            return false;
        } catch (Exception e) {
            // Catches everything beyond: SAXException, and IOException.
            e.printStackTrace();
            return false;
        } catch (Error e) {
            // Needed this for debugging when I was having issues with my 1st set of code.
            e.printStackTrace();
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }
}

Some Side Notes:

For creating the files, I made a simple file utility to write string to files:

public static void createFileFromString(String fileText, String fileName) {
    try {
        File file = new File(fileName);
        BufferedWriter output = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(file));
        output.write(fileText);
        output.close();
    } catch ( IOException e ) {
       e.printStackTrace();
    }
}

I also needed to write to an area that I had access to, so I made use of:

String path = this.getActivity().getPackageManager().getPackageInfo(getPackageName(), 0).applicationInfo.dataDir;   

A little hackish, it works. I'm sure there is a more succinct way of doing this, however I figured I'd share my success, as there weren't any good examples that I found.