Serializing to XML using XStream but not getting all fields

Question

I have a class called Lookup that has two properties:

public class Lookup {

    private String surveyName;
    private String GUID;    

    public Lookup(String name, String guid){
        this.surveyName = name;
        this.GUID = guid;   
    }

}

In another class, I have a list of Lookup that I am trying to serialize and save to file. This is how I'm doing it:

List<Lookup> lookup = new ArrayList<Lookup>();
lookup.add(new Lookup("foo","bar"));
XStream serializer = new XStream();
serializer.alias("Lookups",List.class);
String xml = serializer.toXML(lookup);

The XML I end up with is:

<Lookups>
  <Lookup>
    <GUID>bar</GUID>
  </Lookup>
</Lookups>

As you can see, it only serialized the field GUID but not the field surveyName . Why is it ignoring that field?

Answer 1

Are you sure that you don't modify Lookup variable somewhere else. This code runs fine

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        List<Lookup> lookup = new ArrayList<Lookup>();
        lookup.add(new Lookup("foo","bar"));
        XStream serializer = new XStream();
        serializer.alias("Lookups",List.class);
        String xml = serializer.toXML(lookup);
        System.out.println(xml);
    }
}
class Lookup {
    private String surveyName;
    private String GUID;    

    public Lookup(String name, String guid){
        this.surveyName = name;
        this.GUID = guid;   
    }
}

Output:

<Lookups>
  <Lookup>
    <surveyName>foo</surveyName>
    <GUID>bar</GUID>
  </Lookup>
</Lookups>

Answer 2

Silly me, the mistake was completely on my end. The field name was receiving an empty string, and thus XStream must have been ignoring it.