[STR-2364] A DTD defined in an XML file requires an Internet connection

• Type: Bug
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Incomplete
• Affects Version/s: 1.2.4
• Component/s: Tiles 1 Plugin
• Environment: Operating System: Windows XP; Platform: PC
• Bugzilla Id: 33570
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jean-François Morin
• Created: 15/Feb/05 05:25
• Updated: 16/Feb/11 19:44
• Resolved: 04/Jul/07 05:30

Description

When I use the Tiles plug-in in Struts, if a configuration XML file contains an
external URL for a DTD specification, the Web application does not load properly
if an Internet connection is not present. This problem does not occur with
Struts 1.1.

For example, the following excerpt from my Struts configuration file:

<plug-in className="org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin" >
<set-property
property="definitions-config"
value="/WEB-INF/config/generic-tiles-defs.xml,
/WEB-INF/config/base-tiles-defs.xml,
/WEB-INF/config/tiles-defs.xml" />
<set-property
property="moduleAware"
value="true" />
</plug-in>

refers to the generic-tiles-defs.xml, which begins as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

<!DOCTYPE tiles-definitions PUBLIC
"-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Tiles Configuration//EN"
"http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/dtds/tiles-config.dtd">

If no Internet connection is present, an UnknownHostException is thrown when
Digester tries to open the URLConnection associated to the above URL.

Maybe this exception occurred in previous versions of Struts, but now it is not
managed properly anymore. As a result, this error prevents the Web application
from loading and working correctly.

The exception stack trace begins as follows:

javax.servlet.ServletException: IO Error while parsing file
'/WEB-INF/config/generic-tiles-defs.xml'. jakarta.apache.org
at org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin.initDefinitionsFactory(TilesPlugin.java:235)
at org.apache.struts.tiles.TilesPlugin.init(TilesPlugin.java:139)
at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.initModulePlugIns(ActionServlet.java:839)
at org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet.init(ActionServlet.java:332)
at
ca.ulaval.fsa.drdb.dbfw.webapp.controller.struts.DbActionServlet.init(DbActionServlet.java:18)
[...]

The IO error message comes from the parseXmlFile method of the
org.apache.struts.tiles.xmlDefinition.I18nFactorySet. The exception is thrown by
the xmlParser.parse(input, xmlDefinitions) method call at the end of the try clause.

The related libraries I use are Commons BeanUtils 1.7.0, Collections 3.1,
Digester 1.6, Logging 1.0.4. As mentioned above, if I use Struts 1.1 (and
deactivate my Struts 1.2-specific code) without changing any other libraries,
everything works properly.