In this chapter, we will describe Spring's Object/XML Mapping support. Object/XML Mapping, or O/X mapping for short, is the act of converting an XML document to and from an object. This conversion process is also known as XML Marshalling, or XML Serialization. This chapter uses these terms interchangeably.

Within the field of O/X mapping, a marshaller is responsible for serializing an object (graph) to XML. In similar fashion, an unmarshaller deserializes the XML to an object graph. This XML can take the form of a DOM document, an input or output stream, or a SAX handler.

Some of the benefits of using Spring for your O/X mapping needs are:

Ease of configuration.  Spring's bean factory makes it easy to configure marshallers, without needing to construct JAXB context, JiBX binding factories, etc. The marshallers can be configured as any other bean in your application context. Additionally, XML Schema-based configuration is available for a number of marshallers, making the configuration even simpler.

Consistent Interfaces.  Spring's O/X mapping operates through two global interfaces: the Marshaller and Unmarshaller interface. These abstractions allow you to switch O/X mapping frameworks with relative ease, with little or no changes required on the classes that do the marshalling. This approach has the additional benefit of making it possible to do XML marshalling with a mix-and-match approach (e.g. some marshalling performed using JAXB, other using XMLBeans) in a non-intrusive fashion, leveraging the strength of each technology.

Consistent Exception Hierarchy.  Spring provides a conversion from exceptions from the underlying O/X mapping tool to its own exception hierarchy with the XmlMappingException as the root exception. As can be expected, these runtime exceptions wrap the original exception so no information is lost.

As stated in the introduction, a marshaller serializes an object to XML, and an unmarshaller deserializes XML stream to an object. In this section, we will describe the two Spring interfaces used for this purpose.

public interface Marshaller {

    /**
     * Marshals the object graph with the given root into the provided Result.
     */
    void marshal(Object graph, Result result)
        throws XmlMappingException, IOException;
}

public interface Unmarshaller {

    /**
     * Unmarshals the given provided Source into an object graph.
     */
    Object unmarshal(Source source)
        throws XmlMappingException, IOException;
}

Even though there are two separate marshalling interfaces (Marshaller and Unmarshaller), all implementations found in Spring-WS implement both in one class. This means that you can wire up one marshaller class and refer to it both as a marshaller and an unmarshaller in your applicationContext.xml.

8.2.3. XmlMappingException

Spring converts exceptions from the underlying O/X mapping tool to its own exception hierarchy with the XmlMappingException as the root exception. As can be expected, these runtime exceptions wrap the original exception so no information will be lost.

Additionally, the MarshallingFailureException and UnmarshallingFailureException provide a distinction between marshalling and unmarshalling operations, even though the underlying O/X mapping tool does not do so.

The O/X Mapping exception hierarchy is shown in the following figure:

O/X Mapping exception hierarchy

Spring's OXM can be used for a wide variety of situations. In the following example, we will use it to marshal the settings of a Spring-managed application as an XML file. We will use a simple JavaBean to represent the settings:

public class Settings {
    private boolean fooEnabled;

    public boolean isFooEnabled() {
        return fooEnabled;
    }

    public void setFooEnabled(boolean fooEnabled) {
        this.fooEnabled = fooEnabled;
    }
}

The application class uses this bean to store its settings. Besides a main method, the class has two methods: saveSettings saves the settings bean to a file named settings.xml, and loadSettings loads these settings again. A main method constructs a Spring application context, and calls these two methods.

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.oxm.Marshaller;
import org.springframework.oxm.Unmarshaller;

public class Application {
    private static final String FILE_NAME = "settings.xml";
    private Settings settings = new Settings();
    private Marshaller marshaller;
    private Unmarshaller unmarshaller;

    public void setMarshaller(Marshaller marshaller) {
        this.marshaller = marshaller;
    }

    public void setUnmarshaller(Unmarshaller unmarshaller) {
        this.unmarshaller = unmarshaller;
    }

    public void saveSettings() throws IOException {
        FileOutputStream os = null;
        try {
            os = new FileOutputStream(FILE_NAME);
            this.marshaller.marshal(settings, new StreamResult(os));
        } finally {
            if (os != null) {
                os.close();
            }
        }
    }

    public void loadSettings() throws IOException {
        FileInputStream is = null;
        try {
            is = new FileInputStream(FILE_NAME);
            this.settings = (Settings) this.unmarshaller.unmarshal(new StreamSource(is));
        } finally {
            if (is != null) {
                is.close();
            }
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        ApplicationContext appContext =
            new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("applicationContext.xml");
        Application application = (Application) appContext.getBean("application");
        application.saveSettings();
        application.loadSettings();
    }
}

The Application requires both a marshaller and unmarshaller property to be set. We can do so using the following applicationContext.xml:

<beans>
    <bean id="application" class="Application">
        <property name="marshaller" ref="castorMarshaller" />
        <property name="unmarshaller" ref="castorMarshaller" />
    </bean>
    <bean id="castorMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.castor.CastorMarshaller"/>
</beans>

This application context uses Castor, but we could have used any of the other marshaller instances described later in this chapter. Note that Castor does not require any further configuration by default, so the bean definition is rather simple. Also note that the CastorMarshaller implements both Marshaller and Unmarshaller, so we can refer to the castorMarshaller bean in both the marshaller and unmarshaller property of the application.

This sample application produces the following settings.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<settings foo-enabled="false"/>

Marshallers could be configured more concisely using tags from the OXM namespace. To make these tags available, the appropriate schema has to be referenced first in the preamble of the XML configuration file. The emboldened text in the below snippet references the OXM schema:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xmlns:oxm="http://www.springframework.org/schema/oxm"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.5.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/oxm http://www.springframework.org/schema/oxm/spring-oxm-1.5.xsd">

Currently, the following tags are available:

Each tag will be explained in its respective marshaller's section. As an example though, here is how the configuration of a JAXB2 marshaller might look like:

<oxm:jaxb2-marshaller id="marshaller" contextPath="org.springframework.ws.samples.airline.schema"/>

The JAXB binding compiler translates a W3C XML Schema into one or more Java classes, a jaxb.properties file, and possibly other files, depending on the specific implementation of JAXB. Alternatively, JAXB2 offers a way to generate a schema from annotated Java classes.

Spring supports both the JAXB 1.0 and the JAXB 2.0 API as XML marshalling strategies, following the Marshaller and Unmarshaller interfaces described in Section 8.2, “Marshaller and Unmarshaller”. The corresponding integration classes reside in the org.springframework.oxm.jaxb package.

<beans>

    <bean id="jaxb1Marshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.jaxb.Jaxb1Marshaller">
        <property name="contextPath" value="org.springframework.ws.samples.airline.schema"/>
    </bean>
    ...

</beans>

<oxm:jaxb1-marshaller id="marshaller" contextPath="org.springframework.ws.samples.airline.schema"/>

<beans>

    <bean id="jaxb2Marshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.jaxb.Jaxb2Marshaller">
        <property name="classesToBeBound">
            <list>
                <value>org.springframework.oxm.jaxb.Flight</value>
                <value>org.springframework.oxm.jaxb.Flights</value>                
            </list>
        </property>
        <property name="schema" value="classpath:org/springframework/oxm/schema.xsd"/>
    </bean>
    ...

</beans>

<oxm:jaxb2-marshaller id="marshaller" contextPath="org.springframework.ws.samples.airline.schema"/>

<oxm:jaxb2-marshaller id="marshaller">
    <oxm:class-to-be-bound name="org.springframework.ws.samples.airline.schema.Airport"/>
    <oxm:class-to-be-bound name="org.springframework.ws.samples.airline.schema.Flight"/>
    ...
</oxm:jaxb2-marshaller>
	        	

Castor XML mapping is an open source XML binding framework. It allows you to transform the data contained in a java object model into/from an XML document. By default, it does not require any further configuration, though a mapping file can be used to have more control over the behavior of Castor.

For more information on Castor, refer to the Castor web site. The Spring integration classes reside in the org.springframework.oxm.castor package.

<beans>

    <bean id="castorMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.castor.CastorMarshaller" />
    ...

</beans>

<beans>
    <bean id="castorMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.castor.CastorMarshaller" >
        <property name="mappingLocation" value="classpath:mapping.xml" />
    </bean>
</beans>

XMLBeans is an XML binding tool that has full XML Schema support, and offers full XML Infoset fidelity. It takes a different approach to that of most other O/X mapping frameworks, in that all classes that are generated from an XML Schema are all derived from XmlObject, and contain XML binding information in them.

For more information on XMLBeans, refer to the XMLBeans web site . The Spring-WS integration classes reside in the org.springframework.oxm.xmlbeans package.

<beans>

    <bean id="xmlBeansMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.xmlbeans.XmlBeansMarshaller" />
    ...

</beans>

<oxm:xmlbeans-marshaller id="marshaller"/>

The JiBX framework offers a solution similar to that which JDO provides for ORM: a binding definition defines the rules for how your Java objects are converted to or from XML. After preparing the binding and compiling the classes, a JiBX binding compiler enhances the class files, and adds code to handle converting instances of the classes from or to XML.

For more information on JiBX, refer to the JiBX web site. The Spring integration classes reside in the org.springframework.oxm.jibx package.

<beans>

    <bean id="jibxFlightsMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.jibx.JibxMarshaller">
        <property name="targetClass">org.springframework.oxm.jibx.Flights</property>
    </bean>

    ...

<oxm:jibx-marshaller id="marshaller" target-class="org.springframework.ws.samples.airline.schema.Flight"/>

XStream is a simple library to serialize objects to XML and back again. It does not require any mapping, and generates clean XML.

For more information on XStream, refer to the XStream web site. The Spring integration classes reside in the org.springframework.oxm.xstream package.

<beans>

    <bean id="xstreamMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.xstream.XStreamMarshaller">
        <property name="aliases">
            <props>
                <prop key="Flight">org.springframework.oxm.xstream.Flight</prop>
            </props>
        </property>
    </bean>
    ...

</beans>