Xml to Object java Spring 3

Question

I have a XML and XSD file corresponds to it. I have just started to learn Spring Framework and I use Spring 3. I should write a code that takes that XML file and assigns it to an object at Java. I searched about it but how can I do it with using Spring (maybe some useful tricks or anything else?)

Answer 1

I recently used Spring OXM & JAXB for that. The class is org.springframework.oxm.jaxb.Jaxb2Marshaller . You can, ofcourse, use any other implementation of org.springframework.oxm.Unmarshaller .

But first You'll need to generate the objects based on Your XSD. For that I used maven-jaxb2-plugin .

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.jvnet.jaxb2.maven2</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-jaxb2-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>generate-oxm</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>generate</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <schemaDirectory>src/main/resources/META-INF/xsd</schemaDirectory>
                <generatePackage>com.stackoverflow.xjc</generatePackage>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

And then configure the marshaller:

@Configuration
public class ApplicationConfiguration {

    @Autowired
    private ResourcePatternResolver resourceResolver;

    @Bean
    public Jaxb2Marshaller oxmMarshaller() throws IOException {
        Jaxb2Marshaller marshaller = new Jaxb2Marshaller();
        marshaller.setContextPath("com.stackoverflow.xjc");
        marshaller.setSchemas(resourceResolver.getResources("classpath:/META-INF/xsd/*.xsd"));
        return marshaller;
    }
}

Than just:

File xmlFile = new File("my.xml");
Source source = new StreamSource(new FileInputStream(xmlFile));
JAXBElement<MyXmlRootElemClass> result = oxmMarshaller.unmarshal(source);
MyXmlRootElemClass theObject = result.getValue();

Answer 2

Spring has nothing to do with it. You need some XML databinding tools. There is a lot of them on the market, and my personal favorite is XStream ( http://x-stream.github.io/ ) with XPP backend. Depending on your objects and xml structure other tools may be more suitable

Answer 3

What is exactly the use case ? Imho the best way is what Roadrunner suggests. But if you are using it in some context, like REST requesting and binding xml response, there are nifty abstractions above, like RestTemplate , where you practically don't have to deal with marshaling at all except for creating bean object

restTemplate.getForObject("http://example.com/hotels/{hotel}/bookings/{booking}", Bean.class);

But as I said, if you are just working with XMLs directly, Jaxb2Marshaller is the way.