Creating empty tags using JAXB.

[Jobin Mathew]

Hi,

I have to generate an xml using jaxb. In my xml many tags ar empty. Here I need to set empty string ("") for all the elements I need in the xml. Is there any way to create empty xml tags for all the elements without setting the value as empty string?

Thanks in advance.

[Jobin Mathew]

Any answers ??

[William Brogden]

What happens if you just leave null references?

Bill

[Jobin Mathew]

The tag wont come if we didnt set blank string.

[Paul Clapham]

I don't know much about JAXB but that seems like an extremely sensible design to me. Null produces no element, empty string produces empty element. When you're designing a data structure you do need to distinguish between null and non-null values. Apparently whatever is consuming the output of this JAXB instance didn't do that, and now you have to write an adapter to make up for that omission.

[Jobin Mathew]

So I need to put blnak string for all the empty tages?? :cry:

[Paul Clapham]

You could consider changing the code which processes the output of JAXB so that it handles non-existent elements better.

[Jobin Mathew]

That is fine, but for bix xmls i need to set all the tags with empty string, like

request.setVal1("");
request.setVal2("");
request.setVal3("");
request.setVal4("");
request.setVal5("");
request.setVal6"");
request.setVal7("");
request.setVal8("");
......
........
......

[Paul Clapham]

Let me be clearer, then. Can you explain why it's a problem that an element (to use the standard XML terminology) is missing rather than empty?

[Vikas Sheoran]

I had the same issue while working with JAXB in a Jersey project, i found this article http://jaxb.java.net/tutorial/section_2_2_12_8-No-Value.html#No%20Value

Basically all you need to do is to add nillable = true as an attribute in your @XmlElement annotation, e.g. @XmlElement(nillable=true)

[Chitra Jagannathan]

Even I tried to get this objective - "creating empty tags for the xsd elements using JAXB approach"

But though at the xsd, we specify nillable = "true" : It helps in getting the empty tags but it has got further description with title of the tag.
Is this below tag suggestable -
"<remarks xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:nil="true"/>" (here remarks is the tag which got created with no value, but some schema info is present)