XML schema has a power mechanism called "import". Import allows one XML schema to reference elements and types from another XML schema. This means you could define types to represent commonly used information once and import these types into other XML schemas. Like any powerful tool, the import mechanism also has the ability to inflict pain. In this post I'll demonstrate how to leverage an XML catalog to eliminate the pain when using JAXB's XJC tool to generate classes from an XML schema with imports.
