Mapping an Arbitrary List of Objects using JAXB's @XmlAnyElement and XmlAdapter

This is the complete source code for the following blog post:

• http://blog.bdoughan.com/2012/02/xmlanyelement-and-xmladapter.html

Summary

The @XmlAnyElement annotation enables a property to handle arbitrary XML elements, and the XmlAdapter provides a way to convert an object that can not be mapped into one that can. In this post we will combine these two mechanisms to map a list of arbitrary objects.

We will map:

public class Method {

    private String name;
    private List<Parameter> parameters;

And:

public class Parameter {

    private String name;
    private Object value;

}

To the following XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<method name="addCustomer">
    <id type="java.lang.Integer">123</id>
    <name type="java.lang.String">Jane Doe</name>
    <address type="blog.anyelement.adapted.Address">
        <street>123 A Street</street>
        <city>Any Town</city>
    </address>
</method>

Compile the Example

You can compile the example code using the following command. Maven will automatically fetch the required dependencies.

 mvn compile

Run the Example

You can run the example using the following command.

mvn exec:java