So I am going to avoid going into details for the reasons why. But I have run into a situation where having the ability to include an external file into the portlet.xml, and possibly the portlet-instances.xml would resolve a problem that I have run into. Unfortunately, from what I can see the parser in JBoss Portal seems to not want to actually resolve the include directives from XInclue. Can anyone confirm whether or not it can handle the includes from XInclude?