marshall with xjc created nested classes

Question

<ProductInformation Context="GL">
 <Assets>
  <Asset ID="assetID" UserTypeID="ID">
    <Name>name</Name>
    <Reference ClassificationID="id"/>
      <Values>
        <Value AttributeID="ID">Value1</Value>
        <Value AttributeID="ID">Value2</Value>
          <MultiValue AttributeID="attributeID">
             <Value>value3a</Value>
             <Value>value3b</Value>
          </MultiValue>
     </Values>
   </Asset>
 </Assets>

 <Products>....</Products>

</ProductInformation>

I used this xml->xsd and xjc to create classes from it.

Now I want to create my ProductInformation object,and marshall it.

My problem is xjc create 3 classes and a objectfactory, and some nested classes inside ProductInformation. When I look at the avaliable methods I mostly see getters instead of setters.

"Asset" class has no such methods like;

asset.setValues(List<Value> values)

Also I ended up writing funny code like this;

ProductInformation.Assets.Asset.Values.MultiValue multivalue=new ProductInformation.Assets.Asset.Values.MultiValue();

Is this normal with Jaxb?

Answer 1

The answer given by Ian Roberts is the correct one. I am giving this one to provide some additional information for those people interested in not having inner classes.

XML Schema (schema.xsd)

If JAXB classes are generated from the following XML schema, both the resulting Customer and Employee classes will contain a static nested class called Address (because each contains their own definition of an address). This is in fact why static nested classes are used to avoid name conflict problems.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsd:schema
    targetNamespace="http://www.example.org/company"
    xmlns="http://www.example.org/company"
    xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
    elementFormDefault="qualified"> 

    <xsd:element name="customer">
        <xsd:complexType>
            <xsd:sequence>
                <xsd:element name="address">
                    <xsd:complexType>
                        <xsd:sequence>
                            <xsd:element name="street" type="xsd:string"/>
                        </xsd:sequence>
                    </xsd:complexType>
                </xsd:element>
            </xsd:sequence>
        </xsd:complexType>
    </xsd:element>

    <xsd:element name="employee">
        <xsd:complexType>
            <xsd:sequence>
                <xsd:element name="address">
                    <xsd:complexType>
                        <xsd:sequence>
                            <xsd:element name="road" type="xsd:string"/>
                        </xsd:sequence>
                    </xsd:complexType>
                </xsd:element>
            </xsd:sequence>
        </xsd:complexType>
    </xsd:element>

</xsd:schema>

JAXB Binding File (binding.xml)

A bindings file is used to customize the schema to Java generation. You can specify that everything should be a top level class with localScoping="top-level". When you do this you must make sure to resolve any potential name conflicts.

<jaxb:bindings
    xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
    xmlns:jaxb="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb"
    version="2.1">
    <jaxb:globalBindings localScoping="toplevel"/>
    <jaxb:bindings schemaLocation="company.xsd">
        <jaxb:bindings node="//xsd:element[@name='employee']/xsd:complexType/xsd:sequence/xsd:element[@name='address']/xsd:complexType">
            <jaxb:class name="EmployeeAddress"/>
        </jaxb:bindings>
    </jaxb:bindings>
</jaxb:bindings>

XJC Call

Below is an example of specifying a bindings file when using the XJC command to generate Java classes from an XML schema.

xjc -b binding.xml schema.xsd

For More Information

• http://blog.bdoughan.com/2011/07/jaxb-xjc-and-nested-classes.html