validation problems with SOAP2.1 and Xerces1.4.0

[Paul Lanceman <pa...@db.com>]

We had some 2.1 based SOAP code that was working fine with Xerces 1.3.0, but stopped working when we switched to Xerces 1.4.

I captured a SOAP request message and tried to validate it using a simple framework (xfront) that invoked SAX2Count with schema validation turned on, and validation failed.

I traced the problem down to a null pointer exception that seemed to relate to the resolution of Complex types, and cut away the XML from my test message until I had the most basic XML structure that would cause the problem.


I was left with this:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
    <ns1:placeBuyOrder
        xmlns:ns1="urn:Broking"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns="urn:Broking"
        xsi:schemaLocation="urn:Broking broking.xsd">
      <CustomerSpecifier xsi:type="CustomerSpecifier">
      </CustomerSpecifier>
    </ns1:placeBuyOrder>

Where Broking is defined in an external xsd file.

When I ran this through my validation test code, I got the exception:

java.lang.NullPointerException
        at org.apache.xerces.validators.common.XMLValidator.validateElementAndAttributes(XMLValidator.java:3300)
        at org.apache.xerces.validators.common.XMLValidator.callStartElement(XMLValidator.java:1155)
        at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLDocumentScanner.scanElement(XMLDocumentScanner.java:1862)
        at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLDocumentScanner$ContentDispatcher.dispatch(XMLDocumentScanner.java:1238)
        at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLDocumentScanner.parseSome(XMLDocumentScanner.java:381)
        at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:1035)
        at org.apache.xerces.framework.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:1076)
        at sax.SAXCount.print(SAXCount.java:158)
        at sax.SAXCount.main(SAXCount.java:392)

When I removed the 'xsi:type="CustomerSpecifier"' reference from the XML, the XML validated without a problem. I tried the same fix for another XML message structure, and noticed that because a namespace was already defined for the section, the xsi:type wasn't required for the validation to work.

I traced the problem to a line of code in XMLValidator (Xerces1.4.0):

                        if ((typeInfo.baseComplexTypeInfo.blockSet & derivationMethod) != 0) {

...where typeInfo.baseComplexTypeInfo was set to null.

Has anyone else run into this problem? If so, do any workarounds exist? It would seem that the problem would go away
if the xsi:type references could be turned off from SOAP client messages, but I can't see a way to do this.

Thanks,

Paul Lanceman
Deutsche Bank





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