Marshalling an object that has object fields

Question

Not sure if the title makes any sense. I have an object that I want to marshal using JAXB that looks like this:

@XmlRootElement(name = "subscriptionRequest")
    public class RegistrationRequest {

    private Long id;
    private RegistrationSource registrationSource;
    }

The RegistrationSource object:

 public class RegistrationSource {

    private Integer id;
    private String code;
}

I want to create an xml that has the following layout:

<subscriptionRequest registrationSource="0002">
    ...
</subscriptionRequest>

where the registrationSource attribute value is the code field value from the RegistrationSource object.

What xml annotations do I need to use?

Answer 1

@XmlAttribute on registrationSource, @XmlValue on code. Note that in this case you also should have @XmlTransient on other fields of RegistrationSource, such as id

EDIT: This works:

@XmlRootElement(name = "subscriptionRequest") 
public class RegistrationRequest { 

    private Long id; 
    private RegistrationSource registrationSource; 

    public Long getId() { return id; }
    public void setId(Long id) { this.id = id; }

    @XmlAttribute
    public RegistrationSource getRegistrationSource() { return registrationSource; }
    public void setRegistrationSource(RegistrationSource registrationSource)
    {
        this.registrationSource = registrationSource;
    }
}

-

public class RegistrationSource { 

    private Integer id; 
    private String code; 

    @XmlTransient
    public Integer getId() { return id; }
    public void setId(Integer id) { this.id = id; }

    @XmlValue
    public String getCode() { return code; }
    public void setCode(String code) { this.code = code; }
}

Answer 2

The lame approach would be to add something like

@XmlAttribute(name = "registrationSource")
private String getCode() {
    return registrationSource.code;
}

to your RegistrationSource -- but there must be a more elegant way...

Answer 3

If you want to generate this class automatically using some tools , then try this - Generate xsd from your xml using tools like Trang, and then generate java file from xsd using jaxb. Life would be much simpler :)