Question

I need to parse XML with JAXB which describes structure. E.g. it can be something like:

<structure name="s1">
 <integer value="15" name="i1" />
 <structure name="s1_1">
   <string value="hello" />
 </structure>
</structure>

As you can see, structures can be nested. So my questions are:

1. what is the best practices to represent such structure in Java
2. how can it be parsed using JAXB?

UPD: Structure can contain several different items (integers, strings, float numbers, arrays/etc) and I can’t make assumption about it contents. I just know possible types of fields, but not their quantity or order.

Answer 1

How about:

class Structure
{
    String name;
    Integer value;
    Structure child;
    // or 
    Set<Structure> children;
}

Parsing with JAXB pretty much reduces to using the JAXB tools on the class above and generate the appropriate stubs/proxies/whatever and feed appropriate XML into the marshaller – there are plenty examples on SO and elsewhere.

Cheers,