Castor Generated Classes (XML Marshalling) - XSD Unavailable

Question

I recently moved to a project where I noticed there have a specific requirement to store some data as XML.

The prior team used Castor generated classes to Marshall and Unmarshall the data.

I have a new requirement now that requires me to add some additional (yet optional) fields to this XML. However I realized the prior team supposedly never checked in the XSD at all and I have no way to reach out to them.

The XSD for sure was large and complex since it is responsible for generating around 50 classes. So writing the XSD again is going to be error prone and also a risk that I might end up creating XMLs now that are in compatible with the old XML.

The other alternative I thought of was using a tool like XML Spy and try to reverse engineer the XSD from the XML, however that sounds a bit difficult too since I will need to reverse engineer 20 odd XMLs to generate XSDs and then merge all these XSDs into one, since the XML had several optional sections. There is still an element of error possible in this approach.

The best option I can think of is reverse engineering the classes to an XSD - however Castor supposedly does not support this feature. So I don't have the means to convert these Castor generated classes back to an XSD! While the classes generated by Castor do have some Castor specific methods, in essence they are Pojos if the Castor specific methods are ignored!

Do we have any suggestions here for getting or generating the XSD from java classes? Do we have any other suggestions to solve the issues I discussed?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Just an update, while I have not achieved 100% of what I was looking for, I was able to successfully reverse engineer the XSD using JAXB's schemagen tool.

Just note that castor generates an XXXDescriptor with each class since that does NOT map to the actual XSD do not pass the XXXDescriptor classes as input to the schemagen tool.

The schemagen tool works with the getter methods and ignores methods like Castor's validate, marshall and unmarshall.

So things look quite hopeful at this point, compared to the situation I was in when I first posted the question.

Thanks.