This is rather tricky, but you can use a DTD entity with a schema. Here's an example I just tested with components.xml: <!DOCTYPE components [ <!ENTITY myinfo SYSTEM "resource:WEB-INF/include.txt"> ]> <components xmlns:pay="http://jboss.com/products/seam/examples/seampay" xmlns:core="http://jboss.com/products/seam/core" xmlns:framework="http://jboss.com/products/seam/framework"> .... use &myinfo; somewhere Obviously "include.txt" here would would go in the WEB-INF dir next to components.xml. It's kind of tricky to get an entity reference that will work well both at runtime and in an xml editor. I'm open to suggestions if anyone knows a better solution. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3994010#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...