How do I render an array of Java beans to XML with struts2?

Question

My output should be something like this:

<result>
  <item>
    <id>123</id>
    <src>123</src>
    <dst>123</dst>
  </item>
  <item>
  <!-- ... -->
  </item>
</result>

And the action class would have a method getFoos which returns an array of uniform objects, e. g. like this:

class Foo {
  // ...
  public long getId() { ... }
  // ...
}

I'm using the XSLTResult like this:

<action name="channels" method="loadAll" class="com.econemon.suite.api.impl.FooAction">
  <result name="success" type="xslt">
    <param name="exposedValue">foos</param>
  </result>
</action>

Since I don't want to postprocess the XML, I didn't specify any template, after reading several tutorials that said this would work. Instead, it gives me this error:

javax.xml.transform.TransformerException: Operation not supported. - [unknown location]

So I tried using a template, but it never rendered a list at all. Instead I get

• all properties of the beans toString()ed together
• empty document
• empty <foo /> tag (not <foos />, strangely)

I couldn't find a tutorial that helped me, neither on Beans->XML rendering nor XSLT. One problem is that I have trouble coming up with good search terms: googling "struts xml" and similar returns a huge amount of completely irrelevant links about stuff in struts.xml, excluding "struts.xml" from the results is no good either, because pages I'm looking for would likely have example struts.xml snippets.

I think I wouldn't really need the templates, so if it's possible to do without, great.

Answer 1

Some commenters on this blog post had the same error you mentioned. Maybe on of the posted workaround will help?

http://cse-mjmcl.cse.bris.ac.uk/blog/2007/09/10/1189430125294.html