Question

I’m trying to consume data from a 3rd party web service. Unfortunately, the web service is returning data in what I’d say is an unusual XML format. Here is a sample of the data I am receiving from the service:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <string xmlns="http://mynamespace">(-76.4844131, 39.1031567, 0.0000000)
         (-76.4871168, 39.1031567, 0.0000000)
         (-76.4875889, 39.1042890, 0.0000000)
         (-76.4905500, 39.1052881, 0.0000000)
    </string>

Instead of having a root node that contains a list of waypoint elements (lat, lon, elevation), the root node’s content is a large string value. While I could just parse the string, I was hoping to use JAXB (since I’m using JERSEY for my service calls) to convert this returned XML into a Java POCO.

Ideally, it would be nice to convert the large string body of the root node into a POCO class with a list of waypoints, but I imagine that would require custom XML deserialization outside of JAXB.

But I’d happy with something like this if I could use JAXB:

@XmlRootElement(name="string", namespace="http://mynamespace")
public class Route {
  private String _wayPoints;

  @ ???? 
  public String getWayPoints() { returns _waypoints; }
  public void setWayPoints(String wayPoints) { _wayPoints = wayPoints; }
}

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen any way in JAXB to tell the marshaller that one of my properties should be the content of either the root element or some other element.

Ideally it would be nice if I could annotate my property with something like:

@XmlElementContent(ElementName="string")

and that would marshal/unmarshal the content of my wayPoint property into the content (or innertext) of my root element.

Has anybody had a similar issue? Is there a way to do this with JAXB? Or should I just consider parsing the string and/or writing a custom XML deserializer.

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can use @XmlValue

@XmlValue
public String getWayPoints() { returns _waypoints; }