XPath 1.0 queries on JAXB objects?

Question

JAXB has been great, a real timesaver, but it's still really time consuming to traverse the resulting object trees; almost as bad as working directly with the DOM.

Is there a way that I can do XPath 1.0 queries on a JAXBElement, without having to painstakingly marshal the document to and from a DOM model each time?

Answer 1

Not directly, no. However, you can use Apache Commons Jxpath, which allows you to run XPath queries across arbitrary object graphs, not just JAXB-bound ones. It can be run in "lenient" mode, which is tolerant of nulls.

Extremely handy for replacing those NPE-prone graph navigations.