Process Collection of XML objects returned from a restful webservice in java

Question

I have a restful web service that return a collection of employees but i don't know how to process this returned data. I know if it were to be a single object that was returned i could unmarshal it and cast to my desire class but how do i do that and save my data in a list, arraylist, set or any other form of collection.

//single object (perfect)
Customer c = (Customer) jc.createUnmarshaller().unmarshal(xml);

// Error
List<Customer> list = (List<Customer>) jc.createUnmarshaller().unmarshal(xml); 

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try

@XmlRootElement
class Customer {
    @XmlElement
    String name;
    public String toString() {
        return name;
    }
}

@XmlRootElement
class Customers {
    @XmlElement(name = "customer")
    List<Customer> list;
}

class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String xml = "<customers><customer><name>Ayodeji</name></customer></customers>";
        JAXBContext ctx = JAXBContext.newInstance(Customers.class);
        Unmarshaller um = ctx.createUnmarshaller();
        Customers res = (Customers)um.unmarshal(new StringReader(xml));
        System.out.println(res.list);
    }
}

output

[Ayodeji]