JAXB - Creating modules for reuse

Question

Does JAXB support modular code generation?

Most of my background is with JibX for XML marshalling, but for legacy reasons our firm is using JAXB.

One feature that was available for JIBX was modular code generation. Say I have a main schema but I have several different envelopes for that schema. With JibX I could create a jar file out of the JibX'ed core schema, and then in separate projects I could JibX my envelope schemas and simply point to the shared jar instead of having to duplicate the code generation of the core schemas for each envelope.

I don't yet see a way for JAXB to handle this - has anyone been successful doing something like this?

Thanks in advance, Roy

Answer 1

For the JAXB RI, that's handled with "episode" files (these are really just customization files). Process the core schema first, making sure to have xjc use the -episode <file> arg. Package the results of that processing into a JAR file with the episode file in META-INF/sun-jaxb.episode. Then, pass that JAR file as an arg to xjc when processing the other schemas.