Marshal a field/property to an xml-element with an additional xml-attribute name=propertyName

Question

Hi everyone, I have a java object like:

public class Person {
    private String firstName = "Harry";
    private String lastName = "Hacker";
    private int age = 30;
}

which I would like to marshal into the following xml:

<attribute xsi:type="someType" name="Person">
  <attribute xsi:type="CustomStringType" name="firstName">
    <value>Harry</value>
  </attribute>
  <attribute xsi:type="CustomStringType" name="lastName">
    <value>Hacker</value>
  </attribute> 
  <attribute xsi:type="CustomIntType" name="age">
    <value>30</value>
  </attribute>
</attribute>

so what I want to do, I want all objects in the Person (and the person itself) to be of xml-element "attribute" and to have this xml-element with an attribute "name" which represents the name of the field (lets assume Person is used as a field in class not shown here). Additionally I want to marshal the "primitive types" to have the "value" element with the appropriate value. Can this be done using JaxB? If yes how? What other solutions do you see when the requirement is that it has to be easy (i.e. just add some annotations to the new field) to add new "attributes" (i.e. fields (e.g. an address of the person) to the xml/class structure?

Answer 1

Have you checked out implementing your own custom XmlAdapter, and anotate your Person type with @XmlJavaTypeAdapter anotation?

It allows you to define you own customized serialization strategy.