How do I create an empty tag of anyType without attributes using JAXB

Question

The xsd is here: http://www.iana.org/assignments/xml-registry/schema/epp-1.0.xsd

I don't want to modify the XSD (maintained by a third party) or the XJC generated classes since they get overwritten with every build.

Here is a sample snippet of the above XSD:

<complexType name="dcpAccessType">
    <choice>
        <element name="all"/>
        ...
    </choice>
</complexType>

The corresponding XJC generated class looks like this:

...
public EppDcpAccessType {
    ...
    public void setAll(Object value) { this.all = value; }
    ...
}
...

I want to generate an empty tag such as follows:

<all/>

But I don't know how to set the property to achieve this. If I do the following:

eppDcpAccessType.setAll("");

I get the following (with a bunch of attributes I don't want):

<all xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xsi:type="xs:string"></all>

If I do the following:

eppDcpAccessType.setAll(new Object());

I get the following run time error:

java.lang.ClassCastException: java.lang.Object cannot be cast to org.w3c.dom.Element

How do I generate an empty tag without the attributes?

Answer 1

I had the very same problem. Third party XSD with a mandatory element without specified type.

I resolved it by using:

myJaxbType.setTheMandatoryElement(new org.dom4j.dom.DOMElement(""));

It yielded the outcome:

<TheMandatoryElement/>