jaxb marshalling self relation

Question

Consider the known employee/manager relation ship

public class Employee
{

public Employee manager;
public List<Employee> employees;

}

what i want is a way to marshall an employee such that all the child employees will be marshalled, the parent manager employee also be marshalled. without an infinite cycle loop.

Answer 1

As explained here , you can use the @XmlIDREF annotation to avoid cyclic references.

Add a unique identifier to your employee and annotate it with @XmlID , and annotate your possible cyclic references with @XmlIDREF :

@XmlRootElement
class Employee {
  @XmlID string id;
  @XmlIDREF Employee manager;
  @XmlIDREF List<Employee> _employees;
}