I am having the same problem. I defined a schema for a message - header, body and a footer. This gets generated into the appropriate classes eg headerType, bodyType etc. However I have many message types. I don't want to repeat the header and footer in each xml document that describes the message. I want to describe a header.xml and a footer.xml and include them into the message1.xml, message2.xml etc. However when the JAXB unmarshaller gets to this it throws a JAXB exception. What the approved way of including other xml documents within each other in JAXB?