We recently transitioned some Web services from using XMLBeans to JAXB. One odd thing that we noticed was that you couldn’t return a JAXB Type that followed this format defined in the XML Schema:
<element name="EchoResponse" type="tns:EchoResponseType"></element>
<complexType name="EchoResponseType">
<sequence>
<element name="input" type="string"></element>
</sequence>
</complexType>
It would throw a missing an @XmlRootElement annotation exception.
There’s two ways of getting around this. One way is to define an annotation inside the schema itself. I don’t really recommend this because it makes your elements the Java objects rather than the more useful types, but it is an option. Note you also have to use the -extension parameter for the xjc compiler.
<schema xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:tns="http://www.qualcomm.com/pds/common/schema"
targetNamespace="http://www.qualcomm.com/pds/common/schema" xmlns:jaxb="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb"
jaxb:version="1.0" xmlns:xjc="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb/xjc"
jaxb:extensionBindingPrefixes="xjc" elementFormDefault="qualified" attributeFormDefault="unqualified">
<annotation>
<appinfo>
<jaxb:globalBindings>
<xjc:simple />
</jaxb:globalBindings>
</appinfo>
</annotation>
Another approach is to simply to do this code-side on the return type leaving the XMLSchema intact as follows:
marshaller.marshal(new JAXBElement(new QName("http://www.qualcomm.com/pds/common/schema",
"EchoResponse"), EchoResponseType.class, response),
System.out);
This way when the marshaller marshalls the XML it will be able to determine the parent element for the type that you are returning.
