How to marshall non-string objects with JAXB and Spring
- by lesula
I was trying to follow this tutorial in order to create my own restful web-service using Spring framework.
The client do a GET request to, let's say
http://api.myapp/app/students
and the server returns an xml version of the object classroom:
@XmlRootElement(name = "class")
public class Classroom {
private String classId = null;
private ArrayList<Student> students = null;
public Classroom() {
}
public String getClassId() {
return classId;
}
public void setClassId(String classId) {
this.classId = classId;
}
@XmlElement(name="student")
public ArrayList<Student> getStudents() {
return students;
}
public void setStudents(ArrayList<Student> students) {
this.students = students;
}
}
The object Student is another bean containing only Strings.
In my app-servlet.xml i copied this lines:
<bean id="studentsView" class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.xml.MarshallingView">
<constructor-arg ref="jaxbMarshaller" />
</bean>
<!-- JAXB2 marshaller. Automagically turns beans into xml -->
<bean id="jaxbMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.jaxb.Jaxb2Marshaller">
<property name="classesToBeBound">
<list>
<value>com.spring.datasource.Classroom</value>
<value>com.spring.datasource.Student</value>
</list>
</property>
</bean>
Now my question is: what if i wanted to insert some non-string objects as class variables? Let's say i want a tag containing the String version of an InetAddress, such as
<inetAddress>192.168.1.1</inetAddress>
How can i force JAXB to call the method inetAddress.toString() in such a way that it appears as a String in the xml? In the returned xml non-string objects are ignored!
