Question

Pretty straightforward question. I am using Jersey to build a REST system. If I have a class with a value that I need to use during processing but don’t want sent as part of the XML or JSON output when the class is marshaled, is there a way to ignore it? Something like:

@XmlRootElement(name="example")
class Example {
    private int a;
    private String b;
    private Object c;

    @XmlElement(ignore=true)
    public int getA() { return a; }
    @XmlElement
    public String getB() { return b; }
    @Ignore
    public Object getC() { return c; }
    ... //setters, constructors, etc.
}

I would hope that something like the ignore=true over getA() or the @Ignore over getC() would work, but i can find no documentation.

Answer 1

There are couple options depending on how many fields/properties you want to be ignored.

Option #1 – @XmlTransient

If you want less than half of the properties to be ignored then I would recommend annotating them with @XmlTransient. This will exclude them from the XML mapping.

@XmlRootElement
class Example {
    private int a;
    private String b;
    private Object c;

    @XmlTransient
    public int getA() { return a; } // UNMAPPED

    public String getB() { return b; } // MAPPED

    @XmlTransient    
    public Object getC() { return c; } // UNMAPPED

    ... //setters, constructors, etc.
}

Option #2 – @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.NONE)

If you want more than half of the properties ignored I would recommend using the @XmlAccessorType annotation at the type level to set XmlAccessType.NONE. This will cause only annotated properties to be mapped to XML.

@XmlRootElement
@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.NONE)
class Example {
    private int a;
    private String b;
    private Object c;

    public int getA() { return a; } // UNMAPPED

    @XmlElement
    public String getB() { return b; } // MAPPED

    public Object getC() { return c; } // UNMAPPED

    ... //setters, constructors, etc.
}

For More Information

• http://blog.bdoughan.com/2012/04/jaxb-and-unmapped-properties.html