How does MOXy's xml-transient declaration work?

Question

I have a set of a beans in a separate project that I'm unable to alter. These beans have both JPA and JAXB annotations, and are being used in a RESTful implementation. Most of my relationships are lazy-loaded, and I was hoping to achieve some more granular control over which elements are actually marshalled for transport.

I've got the modified MOXy Customer.java class below.

@javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlType
@javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType(value=javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType.PROPERTY)
public class Customer {

  private String name;
  private Address address;
  private List<PhoneNumber> phoneNumbers;

  // getters and setters
}

I was hoping I'd be able to use the MOXy eclipselink-oxm mapping to control what gets marshalled, but it isn't behaving as I'd expect. Using JAXB annotations, you declare an element (field or property) to be transient, but the eclipselink-oxm.xml only allows transient declarations on types. However, when I declare a type transient like so, I get the following exceptions:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xml-bindings 
    xmlns="http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/xsds/persistence/oxm">
<java-types>
    <java-type name="example.gettingstarted.Customer">
        <xml-root-element/>
        <java-attributes>
            <xml-element java-attribute="name" xml-path="personal-info/name/text()"/>
            <xml-element java-attribute="address" xml-path="contact-info/address"/>
        </java-attributes>
    </java-type>

    <java-type name="example.gettingstarted.PhoneNumber" xml-transient="true" />

</java-types>
</xml-bindings>

Exception:

Exception [EclipseLink-110] (Eclipse Persistence Services - 2.1.0.v20100614-r7608):     org.eclipse.persistence.exceptions.DescriptorException
Exception Description: Descriptor is missing for class [example.gettingstarted.PhoneNumber].
Mapping: org.eclipse.persistence.oxm.mappings.XMLCompositeCollectionMapping[phoneNumbers]
Descriptor: XMLDescriptor(example.gettingstarted.Customer --> [DatabaseTable(customer)])

If I remove the xml-transient attribute, or set it to false, the Customer is transformed into XML as expected. Is there any way I can suppress the marshalling of phone numbers without modifying the Customer bean?

Answer 1

You can specify use the following mapping file to make the "phoneNumbers" property on Customer transient:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xml-bindings xmlns="http://www.eclipse.org/eclipselink/xsds/persistence/oxm">
    <java-types>
        <java-type name="example.gettingstarted.Customer">
            <xml-root-element />
            <java-attributes>
                <xml-element java-attribute="name" xml-path="personal-info/name/text()" />
                <xml-element java-attribute="address" xml-path="contact-info/address" />
                <xml-transient java-attribute="phoneNumbers"/>
            </java-attributes>
        </java-type>
    </java-types>
</xml-bindings>

For more information on MOXy's XML mapping file see:

• http://bdoughan.blogspot.com/2010/12/extending-jaxb-representing-annotations.html