Where Do Schema Come From?

[Cantor, Scott]

> In the platonic sense, how does the IdP actually, functionally load schema for
> e.g. parsing attribute-resolver.xml files?  Does it use the schemaLocation URL
> defined at all, or is that just for human consumption?

Human / editors (and the URLs should all work). All schemas the software is using come from jar files on the classpath and there is no possibility of network access whatsoever, barring deliberate override.
 
> I see "Update schema mapping redirect" all over the place in
> issues.shibboleth.net and a SchemaBuilder in system/conf/global-
> system.xml that appears to load schema from the classpath, but I can't find
> any cohesive description of what's going on.

There's no documentation on the internals at present. It's very complex and involves a lot of different layers doing different things, Spring itself being one.

-- Scott