Enhancing wadl in apache CXF with fasterxml.jackson serializer

Question

I have a rest app using fasterxml jackson for serialization.

I wanted to enhance the wadl to show the model fields inside the representation tag, such as

<representation mediaType="application/json">
  <doc>...</doc>
  <param name="myField" type="xs:string"/>
   ...
</representation>

instead of the vanilla description of:

<representation mediaType="application/json">
  <doc>...</doc>
</representation>

I thought adding a bean for WadlGeneration was all I needed to do...

<bean id="jacksonProvider" class="com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs.json.JacksonJsonProvider">
    <constructor-arg><ref bean="customObjectMapper"/></constructor-arg>
</bean>

<bean id="wadlGenerator" class="org.apache.cxf.jaxrs.model.wadl.WadlGenerator">
    <property name="linkJsonToXmlSchema" value="true" />
    <property name="supportCollections" value="true"/>
    <property name="ignoreMessageWriters" value="false"/>
    <property name="useJaxbContextForQnames" value="false"/>
</bean>

<jaxrs:server id="restContainer" address="/">
     <jaxrs:serviceBeans>
       ...
     </jaxrs:serviceBeans>
     <jaxrs:extensionMappings>
        <entry key="xml" value="application/xml"/>
        <entry key="json" value="application/json"/>
     </jaxrs:extensionMappings>
     <jaxrs:providers>
        <ref bean="jacksonProvider" />
        <ref bean="wadlGenerator" />
     </jaxrs:providers>

</jaxrs:server>

.. but apparently there is more to do. I have seen examples in jaxb and codehaus jackson, but any ideas on how to make this work with fasterxml jackson?

Answer 1

Appears the solution was to include @xmlrootelement on each of my models. Then I used the doc generator: http://enunciate.codehaus.org/index.html

As long as my models have the element defined, it de-serializes as expected.