Question

I’m using Apache CXF for my restful web services. I have a service defined by an interface that returns a list of my bean.

@Path("/")
@Produces("application/xml")
public interface MyService {

  @GET
  @Path("/test")
  public List<MyBean> getBeans() throws IOException;

}

..and the service implementation is as such;

public class MyServiceImpl implements MyService {
  public List<MyBean> getBeans() {
     ArrayList<MyBean> beans = new ArrayList<MyBean>();
     beans.add(new MyBean("foo", "bar");
     return beans;
  }
}

This is deployed on my server and works fine. I can hit the service in my browser and get the result I’d expect. The problem is when I try to get a CXF client to call the service.

In my client app I declare a client with the following spring config;

  <jaxrs:client id="myClient" inheritHeaders="true"
                 address="myhost/test"
                 serviceClass="com.example.MyService">
     <jaxrs:headers>
       <entry key="Accept" value="application/xml"/>
     </jaxrs:headers>
     <jaxrs:providers>
       <ref bean="myJaxbXmlProvider"/>
       <ref bean="myJsonProvider"/>
     </jaxrs:providers>  
   </jaxrs:client>

   <bean id="myJaxbXmlProvider" class="org.apache.cxf.jaxrs.provider.JAXBElementProvider">
     <property name="jaxbElementClassMap" ref="myElementClassMap"/>
   </bean>
   <bean id="myJsonProvider" class="org.apache.cxf.jaxrs.provider.JSONProvider">
     <property name="jaxbElementClassMap" ref="myElementClassMap"/>
   </bean>
   <util:map id="myElementClassMap">
     <entry key="com.example.MyBean" value="bean"/>
   </util:map>

When the client is invoked I get this stacktrace;

org.apache.cxf.jaxrs.client.ClientWebApplicationException:
.Problem with reading the response
message, class : interface
java.util.List, ContentType :
application/xml.
….
Caused by:
javax.ws.rs.WebApplicationException:
java.lang.ClassCastException:
com.example.MyBean
cannot be cast to
org.apache.cxf.jaxrs.provider.AbstractJAXBProvider$CollectionWrapper

Any ideas?

Answer 1

There could be a bug in CXF JAX-RS to do with reading explicit collections of beans which have no @XmlRootElement annotations, looking into it.