Spring inside war cannot find classpath resource in an inner jar file

Question

I have a project organized like this:

core
  -- /src/main/resources/company/config/spring-config.xml
webapp
  -- /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml

The webapp depends on core.jar, which is included correctly in WEB-INF/lib when I deploy.

In web.xml I have:

<param-value>
    /WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml
</param-value>

And in applicationContext.xml I have:

<import resource="classpath:/company/config/spring-config.xml" />

But when I run, I get this error:

2012-10-04 20:03:39,156 [localhost-startStop-1] springframework.web.context.ContextLoader ERROR: Context initialization failed
org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.BeanDefinitionParsingException: Configuration problem: Failed to import bean definitions from URL location [classpath:/company/config/spring-config.xml]
Offending resource: ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml]; nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanDefinitionStoreException: IOException parsing XML document from class path resource [company/config/spring-config.xml]; nested exception is java.io.FileNotFoundException: class path resource [company/config/spring-config.xml] cannot be opened because it does not exist
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.parsing.FailFastProblemReporter.error(FailFastProblemReporter.java:68)
....
Caused by: java.io.FileNotFoundException: class path resource [company/config/spring-config.xml] cannot be opened because it does not exist
    at org.springframework.core.io.ClassPathResource.getInputStream(ClassPathResource.java:142)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.xml.XmlBeanDefinitionReader.loadBeanDefinitions(XmlBeanDefinitionReader.java:336)
... 36 more

When spring-config.xml is in webapp, everything works fine.

I noticed the leading / is removed from some of the errors on the stack trace, and I wonder if this has anything to do with it.

Also, I am (unfortunately) using Spring 2.5, if that matters.

Solution

For future reference, I figured out the problem after much debugging. It turns out Eclipse was building my "core" library as a jar, but with a web application package layout, so instead of my resource being located here:

/company/config/spring-config.xml

it was located here:

/WEB-INF/company/config/spring-config.xml

which caused the problem. I had checked the jar a few times before, but had never noticed the sneaky "/WEB-INF" hiding in plain sight.

Removing the project and re-importing it into Eclipse (via the Maven pom.xml file) was not enough to fix the problem.

I had to manually delete the Eclipse-specific .project, .classpath, and .settings files. When I did that and re-imported the project everything was fixed.

The moral of the lesson is: ALWAYS check your resource paths when the exception says "File Not Found".