Creating Jibx Bindings for Ambiguous XML

[Jon Wilk]

My current project receives XML files and unmarshals them using JiBX. When unmarshaling a message, unknown attributes on an element are ignored, but any elements that are not expected cause parsing exceptions to occur.

The system that sends us the XML messages says that they are going to start sending us XML messages that could contain elements that our JiBX bindings are unaware of. Is there a way to ignore XML elements that JiBX isn't expecting?

Expected in Jibx Bindings:
<Customer name="SomeGuy" occuptation="developer"/>

Future XML:
<Customer name="SomeGuy" occupation="developer">
<telelphoneNumbers>
<PhoneNumber type="work" number="5555555555"/>
<PhoneNumber type="home" number="5555554444"/>
</telephoneNumbers>
</Customer>

In the future XML, we don't care about the telephone numbers, we just want to be able to parse the xml with the unexpected element in it.

Thanks.

[krishna kanthgaru]

short answer yes. i am a newbie to jibx but i have faced the same problem.

you can make use jibx tags like

ordered="false"

allow-repeats="true"

usage="optional"

flexible="true" ( i believe this is what you are looking for in your example )

can refer to the docs at this site , http://jibx.sourceforge.net/ . quite useful.

[Paul Clapham]

I googled for JIBX and found a tutorial. On the third page of the tutorial it said

As of the JiBX 1.1 release, you have the option of ignoring unknown elements within an unordered group.

So it looks like the answer is "yes".