Working around the need for a network connection in Spring and WebLogic SCA tooling in JDeveloper

Unfortunately the Spring tooling we have in JDeveloper 11.1.2 and PS5 contains a bug where it will try to access the network for a .dtd in order to validate the xml files. If you are running the HTTP Analyzer you might see something like the following:

This is fine if you have a network connection, if annoying, but with a timeout of 5 minutes in some cases it can be really annoying if you are trying to work where you cannot see the internet as a whole.

We are going to use a feature of the HTTP Analyzer to use a recording of this response to pretend to be the service in question. For of all we need a log file that contains the response in question, so select the message and press the save button:

Then we have to create a Tape Rule which allows the analyzer to respond using messages from a log file in response to request to a particular URL:

You need to set up the rule as follows, note the reference URL is not part of the definition; but can be used to validate the rule filter settings.

And you should be good to go, next time you start up JDeveloper start the HTTP Analyzer first, and you should see that the messages are being provided by the tape rule rather than the network.

We don't have a handy way to start the analyzer when the tool does; so you have to be careful not to have any open editors. But for some cases this is going to be a useful workaround.