Entity include with relative path in XML using JAXB

Question

Moving this from the Java Technologies for Web Services forum to this one.
With the jwsdp jars I'm trying to use JAXB to load in several specified XML files. This works fine. The XML files are read in from a relative link "/templates/mainXML.xml" and the xml string read in and passed to the unmarshaller as a StreamSource:
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(getClass().getResource(xmlPath_).openStream()));
while ( (line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
buff.append(line.trim()+"\n");
String xml = buff.toString();
u.unmarshall(new StreamSource(new StringReader(xml)))
But my XML files are becoming rather large with some repitition across the files so I'd like to use the entity incude in the header of the XML to abstract some of the XML into addMe.xml e.g:
<!DOCTYPE StrategyTemplate [
<!ENTITY IncludeTimeComponent SYSTEM "file:///templates/addMe.xml">]>
with &IncludeTimeComponent;
But it gives this error:
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: \templates\addMe.xml (The system cannot find the path specified)
at java.io.FileInputStream.open(Native Method)
at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.java:106)
at java.io.FileInputStream.<init>(FileInputStream.java:66)
at sun.net.www.protocol.file.FileURLConnection.connect(FileURLConnection.java:70)
at sun.net.www.protocol.file.FileURLConnection.getInputStream(FileURLConnection.java:161)
at java.net.URL.openStream(URL.java:1007)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.impl.XMLEntityManager.startEntity(XMLEntityManager.java:836)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.impl.XMLEntityManager.startEntity(XMLEntityManager.java:767)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanEntityReference(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:1095)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDispatcher.dispatch(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:1513)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.java:329)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.parsers.DTDConfiguration.parse(DTDConfiguration.java:525)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.parsers.DTDConfiguration.parse(DTDConfiguration.java:581)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.parsers.XMLParser.parse(XMLParser.java:152)
at weblogic.apache.xerces.parsers.AbstractSAXParser.parse(AbstractSAXParser.java:1175)
at weblogic.xml.jaxp.WebLogicXMLReader.parse(WebLogicXMLReader.java:135)
at weblogic.xml.jaxp.RegistryXMLReader.parse(RegistryXMLReader.java:152)
at com.lb.cmte.oms.interpreter.jaxb.impl.runtime.UnmarshallerImpl.unmarshal(UnmarshallerImpl.java:140)
... 11 more
It works fine if I put the file in the working directory or supply the full path e.g.
<!DOCTYPE StrategyTemplate [
<!ENTITY IncludeTimeComponent SYSTEM "file:///C:/dev/templates/addMe.xml">]>
with &IncludeTimeComponent;
I've tried using jwsdp2.0 jars rather than 1.4 I was using previously, but with the same result.
But I don't want to do that, because I don't know where that might be. I'd like to be able to supply the xml file's path as it would be shown within a JAR as I do currently for the mainXML.xml files. Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Oh, I see why. When XML talks about a "relative path" that means relative to the URL the XML was loaded from. But when the parser doesn't have such a URL -- for example in cases like yours where you are parsing from a String -- then it falls back to assuming the XML was loaded from the current working directory.
This is almost never a good assumption, but what else can it do?
Looking at your code, I don't understand why you are parsing from a String anyway. All of that code that reads from an input stream, ignoring the line endings and putting back new line endings, seems pointless to me. You should just marshal directly from getClass().getResource(xmlPath_) as far as I can see. Then your relative paths would work just fine.