Spring schemaLocation fails when there is no internet connection

There is no need to use the classpath: protocol in your schemaLocation URL if the namespace is configured correctly and the XSD file is on your classpath.

Spring doc "Registering the handler and the schema" shows how it should be done.

In your case, the problem was probably that the spring-context jar on your classpath was not 2.1. That was why changing the protocol to classpath: and putting the specific 2.1 XSD in your classpath fixed the problem.

From what I've seen, there are 2 schemas defined for the main XSD contained in a spring-* jar. Once to resolve the schema URL with the version and once without it.

As an example see this part of the spring.schemas contents in spring-context-3.0.5.RELEASE.jar:

http\://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd=org/springframework/context/config/spring-context-2.5.xsdhttp\://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd=org/springframework/context/config/spring-context-3.0.xsdhttp\://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd=org/springframework/context/config/spring-context-3.0.xsd

This means that (in xsi:schemaLocation)

http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.5.xsd 

will be validated against

org/springframework/context/config/spring-context-2.5.xsd 

in the classpath.

http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd 

or

http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context.xsd

will be validated against

org/springframework/context/config/spring-context-3.0.xsd 

in the classpath.

http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-2.1.xsd

is not defined so Spring will look for it using the literal URL defined in schemaLocation.

I solved it

<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"       xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"       xmlns:aop="http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop"       xmlns:tx="http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx"       xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p"       xmlns:security="http://www.springframework.org/schema/security"       xsi:schemaLocation="       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd       http://www.springframework.org/schema/util        http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util-2.0.xsd       http://www.springframework.org/schema/context       classpath:spring-context-2.1.xsd       http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx       http://www.springframework.org/schema/tx/spring-tx.xsd       http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop       http://www.springframework.org/schema/aop/spring-aop-2.0.xsd       http://www.springframework.org/schema/security       http://www.springframework.org/schema/security/spring-security-2.0.xsd"       >

classpath:spring-context-2.1.xsd is the key for working offline mode (no internet connection). Also i copied spring-context-2.1.xsd near (same directory) the application-context.xml file

Something like this worked for me.

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans              classpath:org/springframework/beans/factory/xml/spring-beans-3.0.xsdhttp://www.springframework.org/schema/context              classpath:org/springframework/beans/factory/xml/spring-context-3.0.xsd"