How would I marshal a List of Jaxb Elements without making a wrapper class?

Question

Short of actually making up a writer and appending each element onto the string. Is there a way to get the JAXB marshaller to marshall a list of objects where I can just give it the name of the top element?

I feel like I'm close with this

//http://blog.bdoughan.com/2012/07/jaxb-no-annotations-required.html
public <T> String jaxb(Collection<T> o, Class<T> clazz, String plural){
    try {
        ArrayList<T> al = new ArrayList<T>(o.size());
        al.addAll(o);
        JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(ArrayList.class);
        JAXBElement<ArrayList> amenity = new JAXBElement(new QName(plural), ArrayList.class, al);
        Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller();
        marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
        StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
        marshaller.marshal(amenity, writer);
        return writer.toString();
    } catch (JAXBException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
}

but the result is still coming back as an empty list

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<pluralName/>

Is there a way to do this without just manually pasting strings of xml together?

Update

With some help from Michael Glavassevich I've been able to do this with one caveat, the individual elements are <Item>s

//http://blog.bdoughan.com/2012/07/jaxb-no-annotations-required.html
@SuppressWarnings({ "unchecked", "rawtypes" })
public <T> String jaxb(Collection<T> elements, Class<T> elementClass, String plural){
    try {
        T[] array = (T[]) Array.newInstance(elementClass, elements.size());
        elements.toArray(array);
        JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(array.getClass());
        JAXBElement<T[]> topElement = new JAXBElement(new QName(plural), array.getClass(), array);
        Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller();
        marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
        StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
        marshaller.marshal(topElement, writer);
        return writer.toString();
    } catch (JAXBException e) {
        throw new RuntimeException(e);
    }
}

The result then becomes

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<Basketballs>
    <item>basketball one</item>
    <item>basketball two</item>
</Basketballs>

Answer 1

If you don't want to create a wrapper class you could convert the collection into an array, place that array in a JAXBElement and then marshal it.

For example:

public class JAXBArrayWriter {

    public static class Item {
        @XmlValue
        protected String value;

        public Item() {}

        public Item(String value) {
            this.value = value;
        }
    }

    public static void main (String [] args) throws Exception {
        List<Item> items = new ArrayList<Item>();
        items.add(new Item("one"));
        items.add(new Item("two"));
        JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(Item[].class);
        JAXBElement<Item[]> root = new JAXBElement<Item[]>(new QName("items"), 
                Item[].class, items.toArray(new Item[items.size()]));
        Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller();
        marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
        StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
        marshaller.marshal(root, writer);
        System.out.println(writer.toString());
    }
}

which produces the following document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<items>
    <item>one</item>
    <item>two</item>
</items>