JAX-WS: How to Exclude a "member/field" in a Response Object (WS Response) that is inherited?

Question

I have a WebService that returns as the result of the Invokation of the Web-Service a ResponseObject called "CustomerResponse". When I implement this object "from scratch" everything works fine: My implementation in this case only contains all the needed "Simple Types" like Strings, Integers but NO Object references/associations.

However what I wanted to do is, "reuse" existing Objects. I have in my domain-model a "Customer" Object that is used in the Application itself. Instead of stupidly more or less cloning the Customer into the "CustomerReponse" object (by manually typing again all the members/fields), I wanted to base the CutomerResponse object on the Customer Object by extension:

class CustomerResponse extends Customer

==> The Problem is that now CustomerResponse contains some "internal" fields that were inherited from the Customer Object (like DatabaseID, Security-Stuff) that I do not want to expose via the Web-Service. Furthermore (and thats currently the main problem") Customer also contains a lot of "object references/associations" to other objects like Address, Orders, History that I do not want to expose via the Webservice either. (It seems that Apache CXF "evaluates" the whole Objectgraph and tries to include them in the ResponseObject...)

==> Is it possible to "Extend" WebService Response Objects based on existing Objects and somehow exclude some "members/fields" of the extended supertyp? (So I want to exclude some members (like the DatabseID) and all of the "object associations" like (Address/Orders/Histroy).. How can I acomplish this, with what annotations and procedures?

Thank you very much!! Jan

Answer 1

Regarding the @XmlTransient annotation, I found out that you need to put it on the getter method of the field you want to hide.

public class InputBean
{
    private String fieldShow;
    private transient String fieldHide;

    public String getFieldShow() {
        return fieldShow;
    }

    public void setFieldShow(String fieldShow) {

        this.fieldShow = fieldShow;
    }

    @XmlTransient
    public String getFieldHide() {
        return fieldHide;
    }

    public void setFieldHide(String fieldHide) {
        this.fieldHide = fieldHide;
    }
}

In the example, "fieldHide" will not be visible on the service xsd.

Answer 2

The @XmlTransient annotation is used to hide members which you do not want shown. You should be able to annotate these members, and they won't be bound. Alternatively, change your @XmlAccessorType to XmlAccessType.NONE and only specifically annotated methods will be bound to XML.