The element field is probably not cast to an xs:string.
Can you elaborate on that? Do you mean I have to do something as I parse it in Java? Or is this something wrong with the XML source?
Note that I am not doing anything fancy with XSLT nor even using a schema. This is plain XML. More to the point the code did not change, nor did the XML source. I just fiddled with how I broke my project up.
I do have more info from yesterday...I noticed that the failure only occurs when I perform the parse from a piece of code I am deploying to the server's lib directory because it is a custom registry in WAS. Now, this same bit of code HAS worked in that environment before, but whatever I broke only affects this deployable, not the regular EAR.
I must have broken some classpath setting or something, but the messages I get are infuriatingly unhelpful AND I can tell from the debug that both the XML file AND Xerces are being successfully loaded before the problems occur.