Convert Java object to XML string

Question

Yes, yes I know that lots of questions were asked about this topic. But I still cannot find the solution to my problem. I have a property annotated Java object. For example Customer, like in this example. And I want a String representation of it. Google reccomends using JAXB for such purposes. But in all examples created XML file is printed to file or console, like this:

File file = new File("C:\\file.xml"); JAXBContext jaxbContext = JAXBContext.newInstance(Customer.class); Marshaller jaxbMarshaller = jaxbContext.createMarshaller();  // output pretty printed jaxbMarshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);  jaxbMarshaller.marshal(customer, file); jaxbMarshaller.marshal(customer, System.out); 

But I have to use this object and send over network in XML format. So I want to get a String which represents XML.

String xmlString = ... sendOverNetwork(xmlString); 

How can I do this?

Answer 1

You can use the Marshaler's method for marshaling which takes a Writer as parameter:

marshal(Object,Writer)

and pass it an Implementation which can build a String object

Direct Known Subclasses: BufferedWriter, CharArrayWriter, FilterWriter, OutputStreamWriter, PipedWriter, PrintWriter, StringWriter

Call its toString method to get the actual String value.

So doing:

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(); jaxbMarshaller.marshal(customer, sw); String xmlString = sw.toString(); 

Answer 2

A convenient option is to use javax.xml.bind.JAXB:

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter(); JAXB.marshal(customer, sw); String xmlString = sw.toString(); 

The [reverse] process (unmarshal) would be:

Customer customer = JAXB.unmarshal(new StringReader(xmlString), Customer.class); 

No need to deal with checked exceptions in this approach.