JAXB Marshaller does not have elements whos value is null

Question

When I marshall a java object using JAXB Marshaller, the marshaller does not create empty elements for null files in the java object. For example, I have a following java object:

public class PersonTraining {

    @XmlElement(name = "Val1", required = true)
    protected BigDecimal val1;
    @XmlElement(name = "Val2", required = true, nillable = true)
    protected BigDecimal val2;
    @XmlElement(name = "Val3", required = true, nillable = true)
    @XmlSchemaType(name = "dateTime")
    protected XMLGregorianCalendar val3;
}

When I take an instance of this object, and marshall into an XML, I get the following (This is beacuse I did not set the value for Val2):

<PersonTraining>
      <Val1>1</Val1>
       <Val3>2010-01-01T00:00:00.0-05:00</Val3>
 </PersonTraining>

However, I had expected hte following result from the marshalling operation (Infact, I specifically need element as well so that the XML can be validated against the XSD)

<PersonTraining>
      <Val1>1</Val1>
      <Val2></Val2>
       <Val3>2010-01-01T00:00:00.0-05:00</Val3>
 </PersonTraining>

Please let me know what option I would need to set so that the null value in the object attributes can ALSO be marshalled, and returned as empty/null elements.

Here is the marshalling code:

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance("person_training");   
Marshaller m = jc.createMarshaller();
m.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, Boolean.TRUE);
m.marshal(ptl, sw);

Answer 1

By default a JAXB (JSR-222) implementation will not marshal an attribute/element for null values. This will be true for the following field in your Java model.

@XmlElement(name = "Val1", required = true)
protected BigDecimal val1;

You can override this behaviour by specifying nillable=true on the @XmlElement annotation like you have done here:

@XmlElement(name = "Val2", required = true, nillable = true)
protected BigDecimal val2;

This will cause the xsi:nil="true" attribute to be leverage:

<Val2 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:nil="true"/>

For more information:

• http://blog.bdoughan.com/2012/04/binding-to-json-xml-handling-null.html

---

Java Model

PersonTraining

Since you are annotating the fields you should make sure you specify @XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) at the class or package level (see: http://blog.bdoughan.com/2011/06/using-jaxbs-xmlaccessortype-to.html).

import java.math.BigDecimal;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*;
import javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar;

@XmlRootElement
@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD)
public class PersonTraining {

    @XmlElement(name = "Val1", required = true)
    protected BigDecimal val1;
    @XmlElement(name = "Val2", required = true, nillable = true)
    protected BigDecimal val2;
    @XmlElement(name = "Val3", required = true, nillable = true)
    @XmlSchemaType(name = "dateTime")
    protected XMLGregorianCalendar val3;

}

Demo Code

Demo

import javax.xml.bind.*;

public class Demo {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(PersonTraining.class);

        PersonTraining pt = new PersonTraining();

        Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller();
        marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
        marshaller.marshal(pt, System.out);
    }

}

Output

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<personTraining>
    <Val2 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:nil="true"/>
    <Val3 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:nil="true"/>
</personTraining>