JDom - can an object be parsed into xml?

Question

Im using JDom for creating and retrieving XML messages. I would like to encode an object into xml, say I have a User object class this

class User
{
    int id;
    String name;
}

User user;

Is there a method that will automatically parse an object like this into an XML document or do I have to manually set the elements of the XML document?

Answer 1

XStream can do that for you. http://x-stream.github.io/

XStream is a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again.

Answer 2

As @Ashwini Raman mentions, you can use XStream,

If you need the Object to be converted to a JDOM Element before its output then here's an example of the code you would need.

  //Here I create a new user, you will already have one!
  User u = new User();
  XStream xStream = new XStream();
  //create an alias for User class otherwise the userElement will have the package 
  //name prefixed to it.
  String alias = User.class.getSimpleName();
  //add the alias for the User class
  xStream.alias(alias, User.class);

  //create the container element which the serialized object will go into
  Element container = new Element("container");
  //marshall the user into the container
  xStream.marshal(u, new JDomWriter(container));
  //now just detach the element, so that it has no association with the container
  Element userElement = (Element) container.getChild(alias).detach();
  //Optional, this prints the JDOM Element out to the screen, just to prove it works!
  new XMLOutputter().output(userElement, System.out);

As mentioned in the code you need to create a "container" element to put the object into. you then detach the marshalled JDOMElement from the container (There may be a way of skipping this step, if there is someone please feel free to edit this!) Then the JDOM Element userElement is ready to use.

The Alias

  String alias = User.class.getSimpleName();
  xStream.alias(alias, User.class);

Is necessary ortherwise the root User Element will have the package name prefixed to it

e.g.

<org.mypackage.User>....</org.mypackage.User>

using the alias ensures that the element will just be the class name without the package name

derived from User.class.getSimpleName()