What is sense type element in @XmlElement annotation

Question

What is sens type element in @XmlElement annotation?

sth like this:

XmlElement(name = "userId", type = Long.class)
private Long id;

It is not used during XML generation.

Answer 1

The type property on @XmlElement is used in the following scenarios:

1. Most common case is for untyped lists when you have List instead of List<String> you would use type=String.class .
2. When your property type is an interface you use it to specify the impl class.
3. When @XmlElement is used with @XmlElements to model a choice the type property maps the element to a class.
4. Normally an XmlAdapter can't be applied to a datatype. Using type to bump it up to the correspond object type fixes this problem.
5. If you want to force an xsi:type attribute to be marshalled you can specify type=Object.class .