How to consume XML data using Java and Spring Boot

Question

I need to consume XML data. My XML Snippet:

<TallyTransferResponse>
    <Response>
        <TransactionDocumentNo>iut-1</TransactionDocumentNo>
        <FromLocation>Bangalore</FromLocation>
        <ToLocation>Noida</ToLocation>
    </Response>
    <Response>
        <TransactionDocumentNo>iut-2</TransactionDocumentNo>
        <FromLocation>Bangalore</FromLocation>
        <ToLocation>Mumbai</ToLocation>
    </Response>
</TallyTransferResponse>

Here is code for entity class:

@Entity
public class TallyTransferResponse{
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy=GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private int id;
    private String transaction_document_no;
    private String from_location;
    private String to_location;
public TallyTransferResponse() {}
    /**
     * @param transaction_document_no
     * @param from_location
     * @param to_location
     */
    public TallyTransferResponse(String transaction_document_no, String from_location, String to_location) {
        this.transaction_document_no = transaction_document_no;
        this.from_location = from_location;
        this.to_location = to_location;
    }
//Getters and Setters
}

I'm stuck as to how to write service and controller to consume this XML.

Answer 1

You can use spring's restTemplate to make a (get/post) request to the endpoint and fetch the response as a string like:

final ResponseEntity<String> response = restTemplate.getForEntity(endpointUrl, String.class);

And the map it to XML or JOSN. More straight forward version of this might be requesting and expecting a data model in the response, like:

final ResponseEntity<Company> response = restTemplate.getForEntity(endpointUrl, Company.class);

In this case you will have to add some XML bind annotation to your model class, like:

@XmlRootElement(name="company", namespace="some.namespace" )
@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.NONE)
public class Company {
@XmlAttribute(name="id")
private Integer id;
@XmlElement(name="company_name")
private String companyName;
.....
//the rest of the class is omitted

You can request a JSON response from the service endpoint with adding one additional header to the request, like:

Accept: application/json

Then the data model class cant omit all the XML binding annotations.