Secondary Namespaces¶

What is a secondary namespace?¶

A secondary namespace is one that is referenced indirectly by the main schema, that is, one schema imports another one as shown below:

a.xsd imports b.xsd
b.xsd imports c.xsd

(using a, b and c as the respective namespace prefixes for a.xsd, b.xsd and c.xsd):

a.xsd declares b:prefix
b.xsd declares c:prefix

The GeoTools encoder does not honour these namespaces and writes out:

"a:" , "b:" but NOT "c:"

The result is c’s element being encoded as:

<null:cElement/>

When to configure for secondary namespaces¶

If your application spans several namespaces which may be very common in application schemas.

A sure sign that calls for secondary namespace configuration is when prefixes for namespaces are printed out as the literal string “null” or error messages like:

java.io.IOException: The prefix "null" for element "null:something" is not bound.

In order to allow GeoServer App-Schema to support secondary namespaces, please follow the steps outlined below:

Using the sampling namespace as an example.

Step 1:Create the Secondary Namespace folder¶

Create a folder to represent the secondary namespace in the data/workspaces directory, in our example that will be the “sa” folder.

Step 2:Create files¶

Create two files below in the “sa” folder:

1. namespace.xml
2. workspace.xml

Step 3:Edit content of files¶

Contents of these files are as follows:

namespace.xml(uri is a valid uri for the secondary namespace, in this case the sampling namespace uri):

<namespace>
        <id>sa_workspace</id>
        <prefix>sa</prefix>
        <uri>http://www.opengis.net/sampling/1.0</uri>
</namespace>

workspace.xml:

<workspace>
        <id>sa_workspace</id>
        <name>sa</name>
</workspace>

That’s it.

Your workspace is now configured to use a Secondary Namespace.