I've been getting an error when I run the hbm2ddl ant task after switching to hibernate 3.1 rc2: "Schema text failed: Could not read mapping document from file," followed by the correct path to my mapping xml file, which is also valid. After commenting things out for a while I found that it was getting stuck on a simple string property for which it did not seem to be able to infer the correct type. That is,

<property name="name"/>

fails with the above error, while

<property name="name" type="string"/>

succeeds. This happens even though the class in question includes getters/setters for string properties like this. I also noticed it happening with an id of type string.

This seems so simple, what could be causing this error? BTW it would be nicer if the Hibernate configuration class gave an error message more informative that "could not read mapping document from file," which makes it sound like a path related problem.

Thanks,
Mark Becker

Just my 2 cents:
I recommend bugging H team (submit bugrep) and suggest changing message to something like "Cannot interpret mapping in the file::zzz" for this type of problem, while leaving "Cannot read file:zzz" for the situation when H cannot physically cannot read the file, and "Cannot parse mapping in the file:zzz" for a situation when there are syntax or validation problems.

the stack trace includes more than just "cannot parse mapping..." - read the *whole* stacktrace.

There is no stack trace in this instance, only the bare error message about not being able to read the mapping file.

i dont belive that.

Well, it happens to be true. I have seen a stack trace accompanying the same error message on other occasions, but not now.

so no stacktrace at all ? How do you run this ?

I'm running the schema export ant task (org.hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaExportTask) in cygwin, have also seen the same failure when I run ant under eclipse.

dude ....

in ant:
ant -verbose

in eclipse:
see error log


That will give you the full stacktrace

It turned out to be a classpath problem in my build.xml, hibernate could not find the class in question when the type for the property in the hibernate mapping file was not specified. But when the property types are explicitly specified it evidently does need to load the class to create the schema.

Makes sense but it was just confusing, especially since in other cases hibernate seems more informative in its error messages even when you are not running ant in verbose mode.