Question

I’m using SimpleXml on Android to deserialize an xml which I have no control over. Now, every time the xml changes, it brakes my app because I don’t have the new element defined in my object class. Is there a way I could specify SimpleXML just to ignore those missmaps? Looked at the documentation and can’t find anything to help me solve it.

Answer 1

I’m pretty sure you can get around the strict mapping by replacing your regular @Root declaration with @Root(strict=false), which will eliminate the requirement that every element should match a field in your class definition. More precisely, from the documentation:

This is used to determine whether the object represented should be
parsed in a strict manner. Strict parsing requires that each element
and attribute in the XML document match a field in the class schema.
If an element or attribute does not match a field then the parsing
fails with an exception. Setting strict parsing to false allows
details within the source XML document to be skipped during
deserialization.

There’s also an example given in the list of tutorials on the Simple XML project site.