Question

I’m trying to integrate a SimpleXml library in the project I’m working on. Is there a way to serialize models to XML with some fields being optional. Couldn’t figure it out from the documentation.

Answer 1

You should use the Object representation of the types you have defined:

double -> Double
int -> Integer

This allows you to define them as null like so:

@Root(name = "someWS")
public class GetSmth{
    @Element(name="Latitude", required=false)
    private Double latitude;

    @Element(name="Longtitude", required=false)
    private Double longtitude;

    @Element(name="PageNumber", required=false)
    private Integer pageNumber;

    @Element(name="PageSize", required=false)
    private Integer pageSize;

    @Element(name="CompanyDetailId")
    private Integer companyDetailId;


    public GetSmth(Double latitude, Double longtitude, Integer pageNumber,
                Integer pageSize, Integer companyDetailId) {
        this.latitude = latitude;
        this.longtitude = longtitude;
        this.pageNumber = pageNumber;
        this.pageSize = pageSize;
        this.companyDetailId = companyDetailId;
    }
}

Reviewing the documentation, required=false is more for the object de-serialization than for the object serialization. So, you could use the primitive types there, but doing so would require that you use a non-null value during assignment. Upon de-serialization, if your xml does not define latitude, latitude would be given a default init value of 0 instead of null. Just depends upon what behavior you want.

Edit:

Be sure to define the constructor with the Object representations:

public GetSmth(Double latitude, Double longtitude, Integer pageNumber, 
    Integer pageSize, Integer companyDetailId)