Question

I have a class A with attributes B b and C c that I want to marshall and unmarshall in a way that in c instead of having an java object graph, I want a string representation of the XML fragment, i.e.

@XmlRootElement(namespace="test")
public class A {
   B b;
   C c;
   //omitting getters and setters
}

public class C {
   String xmlFragment;
   //This string will contain the following:
   //"<d>d</d><e><f>f1</f><f>f2</></e>
}

and the resulting/producing XML will look like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<A xmlns="test">
 <B>some B content that is mapped to java objects</B>
 <C>
   <d>d</d><e><f>f1</f><f>f2</></e>
 </C>
</A>

How could I accomplish that using JAXB?

Answer 1

JAXB won’t quite do that. What it can do is handle a org.w3c.dom.Element, and serialize that as XML, i.e.

@XmlRootElement(namespace="test")
public class A {
   B b;
   @XmlAnyElement Element c;
}

So you need to parse that XML fragment into an Element (e.g. using DocumentBuilderFactory), and then it’ll work.

You could, I suppose, parse the Element at runtime, but be very careful of the performance hit:

@XmlRootElement(namespace="test")
public class A {
   B b;
   String xmlFragment;

   @XmlAnyElement
   public Element getXmlFragment() {
       InputSource source = new InputSource(new StringReader(xmlFragment));
       Document doc = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance().parse(source);
       return doc.getDocumentElement();
   }
}