How to get Spring 3.2 to work with Tiles 3 and REGEXP

Question

I'm setting up a project using spring mvc and tiles 3. It's working fine with normal tiles definitions, but I'm not able to get REGEXP: definitions to work. Is there something special that needs to be done?

EDIT

Found out that I have to set completeAutoload property in the view resolver to true. However, I'm getting a class cast exception

java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.tiles.impl.mgmt.CachingTilesContainer cannot be cast to org.apache.tiles.impl.BasicTilesContainer
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesConfigurer.afterPropertiesSet(TilesConfigurer.java:263)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.invokeInitMethods(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1545)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.initializeBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1483)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:524)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.createBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:461)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory$1.getObject(AbstractBeanFactory.java:295)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.getSingleton(DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.java:223)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.doGetBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:292)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.getBean(AbstractBeanFactory.java:194)
    at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultListableBeanFactory.preInstantiateSingletons(DefaultListableBeanFactory.java:607)
    at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.finishBeanFactoryInitialization(AbstractApplicationContext.java:932)
    at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:479)
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.configureAndRefreshWebApplicationContext(FrameworkServlet.java:647)
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.createWebApplicationContext(FrameworkServlet.java:598)
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.createWebApplicationContext(FrameworkServlet.java:661)
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.initWebApplicationContext(FrameworkServlet.java:517)
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.initServletBean(FrameworkServlet.java:458)
    at org.springframework.web.servlet.HttpServletBean.init(HttpServletBean.java:138)
    at javax.servlet.GenericServlet.init(GenericServlet.java:160)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.initServlet(StandardWrapper.java:1266)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.loadServlet(StandardWrapper.java:1185)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapper.allocate(StandardWrapper.java:857)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invoke(StandardWrapperValve.java:136)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invoke(StandardContextValve.java:123)
    at org.apache.catalina.authenticator.AuthenticatorBase.invoke(AuthenticatorBase.java:472)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke(StandardHostValve.java:168)
    at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:99)
    at org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve.invoke(AccessLogValve.java:929)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invoke(StandardEngineValve.java:118)
    at org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.service(CoyoteAdapter.java:407)
    at org.apache.coyote.http11.AbstractHttp11Processor.process(AbstractHttp11Processor.java:1002)
    at org.apache.coyote.AbstractProtocol$AbstractConnectionHandler.process(AbstractProtocol.java:585)
    at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.JIoEndpoint$SocketProcessor.run(JIoEndpoint.java:310)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:886)
    at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(ThreadPoolExecutor.java:908)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:680)

Spring Configuration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- - DispatcherServlet application context for KinzHunt's web tier. -->
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:p="http://www.springframework.org/schema/p" xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.2.xsd
                http://www.springframework.org/schema/context http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.2.xsd
                http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc-3.2.xsd">

    <!-- Enable Spring MVC annotation configuration -->
    <mvc:annotation-driven />
    <!-- Scan the application for all possible controllers & autowire collaborators -->
    <context:component-scan base-package="com.example" use-default-filters="true" />

    <bean id="viewResolver" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesViewResolver"/>
    <bean id="tilesConfigurer" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.tiles3.TilesConfigurer">
        <property name="definitions">
            <list>
                <value>/WEB-INF/tiles.xml</value>
            </list>
        </property>
        <property name="completeAutoload" value="true"/>
        <property name="preparerFactoryClass" value="org.apache.tiles.compat.preparer.CompatibilityPreparerFactory"/>
        <property name="useMutableTilesContainer" value="false"/>
    </bean>

    <bean id="multipartResolver" class="org.springframework.web.multipart.commons.CommonsMultipartResolver" />
</beans>

Answer 1

Turns out to be a bug in Spring's own implementation. I reported the bug on their issue tracker, and sent them a pull request

Answer 2

Your problem seems unrelated to regular expressions or to the spring config that you posted up. I suspect that you are also using some @nnotations. Anyway, Spring claims that you are trying to use an object of type CachingTilesContainer in a place where it requires a BasicTilesContainer, connected up via autowiring. This isn't called out in the XML, so it must be in the Java, so you'll have to find it. Turning the logging level up to DEBUG will give you more to chew on. Not being a Tiles expert, I can only write that this seems peculiar. Look at your Java code for the annotations that set up your container, and see where this is happening.