No solution to validate XML against XSD in Android

Question

I am trying to validate a XML file against XSD on Android devices.

I googled a lot and found some solution like xerces-for-android. In the Stack overflow I found some page like this, which suggests to avoid javax.xml. validation and use Xerces for this purpose.

I tested it in the different Android APIs(17, 20,25) but unfortunately I did not have any success.

Could you please help me and suggest an alternative method.

Answer 1

1 - Go to https://code.google.com/archive/p/xerces-for-android/

2 - Click on source in left menu & in source in the middle page.

3 - Click on download the code & extract the zip contents.

4 - In the extracted content navigate to the folder "xerces-for-android/trunk/src".

5 - Copy the folder "mf" in your [AndroidApp|AndroidModule] "src/main/java" directory.

6 - Now you have to create a folder called "resources" on your "src/main" directory. This can be done in Android Studio (RightClick on your Module/App -> New -> Folder -> Java Resource Folder).

7 - Inside that folder you must create the next folder structure:
mf/org/apache/xerces/impl/msg
&
mf/org/apache/xerces/impl/xpath/regex

8 - Copy the files with ".properties" extension from the equivalent extranted contents folders inside this directories.

---

When you validate the XML files with XSD with something like that

SchemaFactory factory = new XMLSchemaFactory();
Source schemaFile = new StreamSource( /*Input stream to your schema*/ );
Source xmlSource = new StreamSource( /*Input stream to your xml source*/ );
Schema schema = factory.newSchema(schemaFile);
Validator validator = schema.newValidator();
validator.validate(xmlSource);

Don't use the SDK imports and use the mf... package ones.

import mf.javax.xml.transform.Source;
import mf.javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;
import mf.javax.xml.validation.Schema;
import mf.javax.xml.validation.SchemaFactory;
import mf.javax.xml.validation.Validator;
import mf.org.apache.xerces.jaxp.validation.XMLSchemaFactory;

---

Edited to reply the comment.

When I was looking for information on how to validate Xml documents with Xml Schema in Android I stumbled upon comments about this project, although it only contained a zip and no documentation.

I looked for a repository that had commits and found this https://github.com/MaTriXy/xerces-for-android where the last commit was made 4 years ago.

After copying the .java files but not the .profile within resources, an exception was thrown, saying that the .profile were not found, look for new information and I saw that the .profile have to be inside the resources folder in Android Studio.

Probably, and this is an assumption, the project was a jar for Eclipse/Ant and now does not work with AndroidStudio/Gradle.

You can create an .aar. Create an Android library module in your project, perform the same steps and compile the application for release.

Within your project, in the directory.

/Yourproject/yourmodule/build/outputs/aar/

There will be a file called yourmodule-release.arr and you should be able to use that package and delete the module.

Looking for information I also found information about jarjar which seems to be a project to make this adaptation in a simpler way.

https://github.com/shevek/jarjar

Have a nice day.