Dealing with Issues fetching the XPathFactory on later versions of Java

[michaelwiles]

Firstly, apologies if this is the wrong forum for this discussion. This is not really a question that works for stack overflow.

I'm getting the following error:

Caused by: java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError: Exception java.lang.RuntimeException: XPathFactory#newInstance() failed to create an XPathFactory for the default object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom with the XPathFactoryConfigurationException: java.util.ServiceConfigurationError: javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory: jar:file:/home/michael/.m2/repository/net/sf/saxon/saxon/9.3/saxon-9.3.jar!/META-INF/services/javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory:2: Illegal configuration-file syntax [in thread "main"]
at java.xml/javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory.newInstance(XPathFactory.java:119)
at org.springframework.xml.xpath.Jaxp13XPathExpressionFactory.(Jaxp13XPathExpressionFactory.java:44)
at org.springframework.xml.xpath.XPathExpressionFactory.createXPathExpression(XPathExpressionFactory.java:72)

Some googling let me here and here.

And has to do with the version of saxon in use and newer versions of java.

So this is the line of code in Jaxp13XPathExpressionFactory referenced in the stack trace:

private static XPathFactory xpathFactory = XPathFactory.newInstance();

It seems there are two ways to address this problem:

1. Use a different implementation of Saxon
2. Change the way this XMlFactory is instantiated

I'm wondering if the latter approach is a possiblity in the spring context. It would mean somehow providing a way to customise this instantiation... or better still, maybe we can inject the factory?

I'm just raising this as I want to see whether I can avoid changing the version of saxon that is in use.