[MASSEMBLY-360] When using mulitple Spring dependencies, the files from META-INF (from the Spring jars) overwrite each other in an executable jar-with-dependencies.

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Affects Version/s: 2.2-beta-2
• Fix Version/s: 2.2
• Environment: Windows XP, Java 5
• Assignee: John Dennis Casey
• Reporter: Marielle Enderman
• Created: 16/Oct/08 06:32
• Updated: 03/Dec/17 11:49
• Resolved: 21/Sep/10 16:10

Description

I'm working on a Java 5 project with maven 2 and I need to deliver an executable jar file. In this project I'm using different Spring dependencies:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-beans</artifactId>
<version>2.5.5</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
<version>2.5.5</version>
</dependency>

For maven packaging I'm using the maven-assembly plugin to create an executable jar with dependencies (using the jar-with-dependencies descriptor). Everything works fine, except that Spring's XSD files can't be found. At least: not all of them. The fact is: Every Spring JAR file contains a META-INF directory with files like spring.handlers and spring.schemas which contain list of locations of respectively namespace handlers and schemas. Unfortunately these files aren't merged during packaging so the META_INF of the executable JAR file only contains the last one added.

This can result in errors like this:

Example 1: The spring-context-2.5.xsd can't be found:
WARN org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader - Ignored XML validation warning org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: schema_reference.4: Failed to read schema document 'http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd', because 1) could not find the document; 2) the document could not be read; 3) the root element of the document is not <xsd:schema>.

Example 2: The NamespaceHandler for the spring context namespace can't be located:
Exception in thread "main" org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem: Unable to locate Spring NamespaceHandler for XML schema namespace http://www.springframework.org/schema/context

When I manually merge the files, the executable JAR file works fine.
I hope this problem can be solved.