A common Hibernate’s error, this is caused by the missing dependency library – dom4j.

Initial SessionFactory creation failed.java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/dom4j/DocumentException
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
	at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.buildSessionFactory(HibernateUtil.java:18)
	at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.<clinit>(HibernateUtil.java:8)
	at com.mkyong.common.App.main(App.java:17)
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/dom4j/DocumentException
	at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.buildSessionFactory(HibernateUtil.java:13)
	... 2 more
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.dom4j.DocumentException
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:200)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307)
	at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:252)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:320)
	... 3 more

Solution

You can download the library here – http://sourceforge.net/projects/dom4j/files/dom4j/

Or

Add the dependency in Maven’s pom.xml

       <dependency>
		<groupId>dom4j</groupId>
		<artifactId>dom4j</artifactId>
		<version>1.6.1</version>
	</dependency>
This article was posted in Hibernate category.