The following steps illustrate setting up Eclipse to be XSD-aware. The assumption in the following steps is that you already have an Eclipse project open (either a brand new project or an already existing one).

	Note
	The following steps were created using Eclipse 3.2. The setup will probably be the same (or similar) on an earlier or later version of Eclipse.

1. Step One

   Create a new XML file. You can name this file whatever you want. In the example below, the file is named 'context.xml'. Copy and paste the following text into the file so that it matches the screenshot.

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"
          xsi:schemaLocation="
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
   http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-2.5.xsd">
   
   </beans>

   

2. Step Two

   As can be seen in the above screenshot (unless you have a customised version of Eclipse with the correct plugins) the XML file will be treated as plain text. There is no XML editing support out of the box in Eclipse, and as such there is not even any syntax highlighting of elements and attributes. To address this, you will have to install an XML editor plugin for Eclipse...

   Table C.1. Eclipse XML editors

   XML Editor	Link
   The Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP)	http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/
   A list of Eclipse XML plugins	http://eclipse-plugins.2y.net/eclipse/plugins.jsp?category=XML

   
   

   Contributing documentation...

   Patches showing how to configure an Eclipse XML editor are welcomed. Any such contributions are best submitted as patches via the Spring Framework JIRA Issue Tracker and may be featured in the next release.

   Unfortunately, precisely because there is no standard XML editor for Eclipse, there are (bar the one below) no further steps showing you how to configure XML Schema support in Eclipse... each XML editor plugin would require its very own dedicated section, and this is Spring reference documentation, not Eclipse XML editor documentation. You will have to read the documentation that comes with your XML editor plugin (good luck there) and figure it out for yourself.

3. Spring IDE

   There is a dedicated Spring Framework plugin for Eclipse called Spring IDE and it is pretty darn cool. (There's a considered and non-biased opinion for you!) This plugin makes using Spring even easier, and it has more than just support for the core Spring Framework... Spring Web Flow is supported too. Details of how to install Spring IDE can be found on the Spring IDE installation page.

   

4. Web Tools Platform (WTP) for Eclipse

   If you are using the Web Tools Platform (WTP) for Eclipse, you don't need to do anything other than open a Spring XML configuration file using the WTP platform's XML editor. As can be seen in the screenshot below, you immediately get some slick IDE-level support for autocompleting tags and suchlike.

   

The following steps illustrate setting up the IntelliJ IDEA IDE to be XSD-aware. The assumption in the following steps is that you already have an IDEA project open (either a brand new project or an already existing one).

Repeat as required for setting up IDEA to reference the other Spring XSD files.

1. Step One

   Create a new XML file (you can name this file whatever you want). In the example below, the file is named 'context.xml'. Copy and paste the following text into the file so that it matches the screenshot.

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"
          xsi:schemaLocation="
          http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
          http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-2.5.xsd">
   
   </beans>

   

2. Step Two

   As can be seen in the above screenshot, the XML file has a number of nasty red contextual error markers. To rectify this, IDEA has to be made aware of the location of the referenced XSD namespace(s).

   To do this, simply position the cursor over the squiggly red area (see the screenshot below); then press the Alt+Enter keystroke combination, and press the Enter key again when the popup becomes active to fetch the external resource.

   

3. Step Three

   If the external resource could not be fetched (maybe no active Internet connection is available), you can manually configure the resource to reference a local copy of the XSD file. Simply open up the 'Settings' dialog (using the Ctrl+A+S keystroke combination or via the 'File|Settings' menu), and click on the 'Resources' button.

   

4. Step Four

   As can be seen in the following screenshot, this will bring up a dialog that allows you to add an explicit reference to a local copy of the util schema file. (You can find all of the various Spring XSD files in the 'src' directory of the Spring distribution.)

   

5. Step Five

   Clicking the 'Add' button will bring up another dialog that allows you to explicitly to associate a namespace URI with the path to the relevant XSD file. As can be seen in the following screenshot, the 'http://www.springframework.org/schema/util' namespace is being associated with the file resource 'C:\bench\spring\src\org\springframework\beans\factory\xml\spring-util-2.5.xsd'.

   

6. Step Six

   Exiting out of the nested dialogs by clicking the 'OK' button will then bring back the main editing window, and as can be seen in the following screenshot, the contextual error markers have disappeared; typing the '<' character into the editing window now also brings up a handy dropdown box that contains all of the imported tags from the util namespace.