I'm sorry, Alexey. I forgot the most important part:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!-- Should Fail to validate -->
<garbageRoot>
</garbageRoot>

<xsd:attribute name="name" type="xsd:string" use="required" />

The version I'm using in JBoss Tools / JBDS is "jbossxb-1.0.1.TEST.jar", which was found somewhere in our repository (internal?) but has been used in the tooling for a while. Should I be using a newer version?

Ok clearly some of my text didn't post. Let me try that again with obvious changes

[garbageRoot]
[/garbageRoot]

So is there any part of jboss xb which *can* validate as such and fail when a required attribute is *not* present?

Thanks for the replies:

Just setting validation and schema validation to true did not accomplish what I needed it to do. I still was unable to access the parser to set the properties needed. I ended up cloning UnmarshallerImpl and making the getParser() method public (rather than package private) to do what I needed it to.

public class ParseTest extends TestCase {
 private static final String SCHEMA = "/home/rob/apps/eclipse/workspaces/work/garbage/src/schema.xsd";
 private static final String DATA = "/home/rob/apps/eclipse/workspaces/work/garbage/data/test.xml";
 public void testABC() {
 try {
 File f = new File(SCHEMA);
 InputStream stream = new FileInputStream(f);
 SchemaBinding binding = XsdBinder.bind(stream, "UTF-8", (String)null);
 stream.close();
 binding.setStrictSchema(true);
 UnmarshallerImpl unmarshaller = new UnmarshallerImpl();
 String schemaLocation = new File("/home/rob/apps/eclipse/workspaces/work/garbage/src/schema.xsd").toURI().toURL().toExternalForm();
 unmarshaller.setValidation(true);
 unmarshaller.getParser().setFeature("http://apache.org/xml/features/validation/schema", true);
 unmarshaller.getParser().setProperty("http://apache.org/xml/properties/schema/external-noNamespaceSchemaLocation",
 schemaLocation);
 FileInputStream dataStream = new FileInputStream(new File(DATA));
 Object xmlObject = unmarshaller.unmarshal(dataStream, binding);
 System.out.println("object is " + xmlObject);
 } catch( Exception e ) {
 // GOOD! I want XB to fail!
 return;
 }
 fail("data file should not have validated!");
 }
}

Ok... well... for writing a file, it's obvious to me that JBoss XB cannot validate the object conforms to schema until either a) its done marshalling the object, or b) doing it while serializing.

I'm currently using XercesXSMarshaller to serialize my object, and after tracing through, it doesn't seem to check any data structure at all to see if any required attributes are missing.

I notice that around line 492 in XercesXSMarshaller, it gets a list of attributes that can be there, but after browsing that data structure in eclipse's debugger, I don't see any reference to whether that attribute is optional or required.

if I were able to find which data structure in xerces holds that critical information, I could provide either a patch or a new class (ValidatingXercesXSMarshaller?) that would be able to validate while marshalling the object (or throw an XB Exception if it were to fail validation.)

Is this reasonable? I think it seems like a good idea to have a marshaller that can validate while marshalling or throw an exception upon failure.

Otherwise, I'd most likely need to force my GenericObjectModelProvider implementation do the validation itself inside the getAttributeValue(etc) method, which would then need to be manually changed if the schema were to change.

Thoughts?