Converting generic object to XML in Java

Question

The following code works correctly:

import java.io.Serializable;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;

@XmlRootElement(name = "data")
public class Data implements Serializable{

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
    private long value1;

    public Data(){}
    public Data(long v1){
        this.value1 = v1;
    }
    public long getValue1() {
        return value1;
    }
    @XmlElement
    public void setValue1(long value1) {
        this.value1 = value1;
    }
}

However this doesn't:

@XmlRootElement(name = "data")
public class Data implements Serializable{

    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;
    private Object value1;

    public Data(){}
    public Data(Object v1){
        this.value1 = v1;
    }
    public Object getValue1() {
        return value1;
    }
    @XmlElement
    public void setValue1(Object value1) {
        this.value1 = value1;
    }
}

As you can see all I changed was the primitive long data type to the generic Object.

This crashes the server, it seems the XML library can't deal with generic objects.

Is there maybe a way to tell the XML library to treat each object as whatever class it is during runtime?

What exactly are you trying to achieve? Is it for web service or writing to a file? Which library are you using? — MojoJojo, Jun 27 '16 at 14:48
Consider an xml root element which has a list of inner elements. This could be a list of numbers, or a list of other xml objects. Hence the generic object. This is to save me having to write a class for each specific situation — Greg Peckory, Jun 27 '16 at 14:52
Does this help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7037531/fetching-rest-resource-as-listt-with-jersey ? — MojoJojo, Jun 27 '16 at 14:57

Converting generic object to XML in Java

0 Answers0