Question

We are trying to build some RESTful services with Spring MVC. We will be providing several representations: XML, HTML, & JSON. We would like to use JiBX as the OXM technology.

We are currently having difficulty figuring out how to wire up Spring with JiBX. If we want to wire up a single class, for example Customer, we simply define a JibxMarshaller, an XML MarshallingView, and add it too our ContentNegotiatingViewResolver. This works great.

The problem is we aren’t sure how to wire up marshalling of multiple classes, for example, Customer and User. Each JibxMarshaller can support only one class (unlike the Jaxb2Marshaller which can support many). We tried declaring a marshaller for each class, but the MarshallingView only support one marshaller. Declaring multiple MarshallingViews does not work (it appears only the first one works).

Your advice is appreciated. Thanks.

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.ContentNegotiatingViewResolver">
    <property name="mediaTypes">
        <util:map>
            <entry key="xml" value="application/xml"/>
        </util:map>
    </property>
    <property name="defaultViews">
        <util:list>
            <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.xml.MarshallingView">
                <property name="marshaller" ref="userMarshaller"/>
            </bean>
            <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.xml.MarshallingView">
                <property name="marshaller" ref="customerMarshaller"/>
            </bean>
        </util:list>
    </property>
</bean>

<bean id="userMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.jibx.JibxMarshaller">
    <property name="targetClass" value="com.mycompany.User"/>
</bean>
<bean id="customerMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.jibx.JibxMarshaller">
    <property name="targetClass" value="com.mycompany.Customer"/>
</bean>

---

Update based on Ritesh’s answer below:

It turns out that I was thrown off by the targetClass property of the JibxMarshaller. I thought it meant the marshaller would only work for a single class, however, it appears to just uses the target class as a way of finding all related bindings. So, the solution is to use just a single marshaller, using an arbitrary target class from your set of classes you have bindings for. For example:

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.ContentNegotiatingViewResolver">
    <property name="mediaTypes">
        <util:map>
            <entry key="xml" value="application/xml"/>
        </util:map>
    </property>
    <property name="defaultViews">
        <util:list>
            <bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.xml.MarshallingView">
                <property name="marshaller" ref="jibxMarshaller"/>
            </bean>
        </util:list>
    </property>
</bean>

<bean id="jibxMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.jibx.JibxMarshaller">
    <property name="targetClass" value="com.mycompany.User"/>
</bean>

Answer 1

JiBX binding compiler adds JiBX_bindingList field to class files. At run time, the ‘targetClass’ (any compiled class with JiBX_bindingList field) is used to build a BindingFactory. It is the getMappedClasses() of IBindingFactory which is used by JibxMarshaller
in supports() method to check if marshaller can marshal a class.

Please also see JiBX runtime usage.