Question

I call an XML document three-layered if its structure is laid out as following: the root element contains some container elements (I’ll call them entities), each of them has some simpleType elements inside (I’ll call them properties).
Something like that:

<data>
 <spaceship>
    <number>1024</number>
    <name>KTHX</name>
 </spaceship>
 <spaceship>
    <number>1624</number>
    <name>LEXX</name>
 </spaceship>
 <knife>
    <length>10</length>
 </knife>
</data>

where spaceship is an entity, and number is a property.

My problem is stated below:

Given

schema: an arbitrary xsd file describing a three-layered document, loaded at runtime.
xmlDocument: an xml document conforming to the schema.

Create

A Map<String, Map <String, Object>> containing data from the xmlDocument, where first key corresponds to entity, second key correponds to this entity’s property, and the value corresponds to this property’s value, after casting it to a proper java type (for example, if the schema sets the property value to be xs:int, then it should be cast to Integer).

What is the easiest way to achieve this result with existing libraries?

P. S.
JAXB is not really an option here. The schema might be arbitrary and unknown at compile-time. Also I wish to avoid an excessive use of reflection (associated with converting the beans to maps). I’m looking for something that would allow me to make the typecasts while xml is being parsed.

Answer 1

I have finally went with using Castor library for parsing the schema and assigning data types manually.