ORABPEL-05250 deploying to Oracle SOA Suite 11g

Problem:

When deploying a composite directly from JDeveloper 11g, I received the following error:

[03:54:05 PM] Error deploying archive sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar to partition "default" on server soa_server1 [oradev.ipnweb.inc:8001]
[03:54:05 PM] HTTP error code returned [500]
[03:54:05 PM] Error message from server:
Error during deployment: Error occurred during deployment of component: HelloWorld to service engine: implementation.bpel, for composite: HelloWorld: ORABPEL-05250
Error deploying BPEL suitcase.error while attempting to deploy the BPEL component file "/u01/app/oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/soa_domain/deployed-composites/Helloworld_rev1.0/sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0/soa_e402b66f-a3f3-453d-b523-a9547206f05b"; the exception reported is: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.collaxa.cube.xml.xpath.BPELXPathFunctionNameResolver

This error contained an exception thrown by the underlying deployment module.
Verify the exception trace in the log (with logging level set to debug mode).
.
[03:54:05 PM] Check server log for more details.
[03:54:05 PM] Error deploying archive sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar to partition "default" on server soa_server1 [oradev.ipnweb.inc:8001]
[03:54:05 PM] #### Deployment incomplete. ####
[03:54:05 PM] Error deploying archive file:/C:/HelloWorld/deploy/sca_HelloWorld_rev1.0.jar
(oracle.tip.tools.ide.fabric.deploy.common.SOARemoteDeployer)

Solution:

This was directly related to a recent configuration change we made to the following file:

$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA1/soa/modules/oracle.soa.ext_11.1.1/classes/META-INF/ext-soa-xpath-functions-config.xml

We edited this file to add a new custom xpath function that we wrote.

Basically, we added the function name and parameters, but we forgot to add the namespace prefix to the first entry of the file (highlighted in bold below):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<soa-xpath-functions xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/soa/config/xpath"
                     xmlns:aia="http://www.oracle.com/XSL/Transform/java/oracle.apps.aia.core.xpath.AIAFunctions"
                     xmlns:utl="http://www.oracle.com/XSL/Transform/java/com.util.getAge">

Once we added this and bounced the server, our code deployments now worked.

Applicable Versions:

Oracle SOA Suite 11g (11.1.1.3)