Appending xml on spring boot response

Question

So I have this controller. I am appending an xml string inside the response which is also xml.

@GetMapping(value = "/testxml", consumes = { MediaType.APPLICATION_XML_VALUE }, 
        produces = { MediaType.APPLICATION_XML_VALUE })
public ResponseData getXml(@RequestBody RequestData rData) {

    
    String xml = "<TEST><INNER_TEST>test</INNER_TEST></TEST>";
    ResponseData response = new ResponseData();
    response.setAge(rData.getAge());
    response.setXml(xml);
    response.setName(rData.getName());
    return response;
}

I am expecting this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<responseData>
    <age>17</age>
    <name>sample</name>
    <xml><TEST><INNER_TEST>test</INNER_TEST></TEST></xml>
</responseData>

but instead got this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<responseData>
    <age>17</age>
    <name>sample</name>
    <xml>&lt;TEST&gt;&lt;INNER_TEST&gt;test&lt;/INNER_TEST&gt;&lt;/TEST&gt;</xml>
</responseData>

now, I know that < and > (plus others) gets converted to that escaped character when spring boot marshalls the response, but is there a way to ignore that given:

-xml can be any form of xml. No format. Could be QWERTY or 12345 or anything as long as it's xml. -cannot use CDATA. Must keep the parent response's format of whatever xml string

Answer 1

Answer:

Use this on your configuration class (@Configuration) to override xml marshalling so it does not escape the characters.

@Bean
public HttpMessageConverter<Object> messageConverter() {
    return new MarshallingHttpMessageConverter(getJaxb2Marshaller());
}

@Bean
public Jaxb2Marshaller getJaxb2Marshaller() {
    Jaxb2Marshaller jaxb2Marshaller = new Jaxb2Marshaller();
    Map<String, Object> map = new HashMap<String, Object>();
    jaxb2Marshaller.setClassesToBeBound(TestModel.class);
    map.put(CharacterEscapeHandler.class.getName(),
            new CharacterEscapeHandler() {
                @Override
                public void escape(char[] ac, int i, int j, boolean flag,
                                   Writer writer) throws IOException {
                    writer.write(ac, i, j);
                }
            });
    jaxb2Marshaller.setMarshallerProperties(map);

    return jaxb2Marshaller;
}