Convert Java object to XML string

Question

Yes, yes I know that lots of questions were asked about this topic. But I still cannot find the solution to my problem. I have a property annotated Java object. For example Customer, like in this example. And I want a String representation of it. Google reccomends using JAXB for such purposes. But in all examples created XML file is printed to file or console, like this:

File file = new File("C:\\file.xml");
JAXBContext jaxbContext = JAXBContext.newInstance(Customer.class);
Marshaller jaxbMarshaller = jaxbContext.createMarshaller();

// output pretty printed
jaxbMarshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);

jaxbMarshaller.marshal(customer, file);
jaxbMarshaller.marshal(customer, System.out);

But I have to use this object and send over network in XML format. So I want to get a String which represents XML.

String xmlString = ...
sendOverNetwork(xmlString);

How can I do this?

Answer 1

Using ByteArrayOutputStream

public static String printObjectToXML(final Object object) throws TransformerFactoryConfigurationError,
        TransformerConfigurationException, SOAPException, TransformerException
{
    ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    XMLEncoder xmlEncoder = new XMLEncoder(baos);
    xmlEncoder.writeObject(object);
    xmlEncoder.close();

    String xml = baos.toString();
    System.out.println(xml);

    return xml.toString();
}

Answer 2

You can marshal it to a StringWriter and grab its string. from toString().

Answer 3

Testing And working Java code to convert java object to XML:

Customer.java

import java.util.ArrayList;

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAttribute;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;


@XmlRootElement
public class Customer {

    String name;
    int age;
    int id;
    String desc;
    ArrayList<String> list;

    public ArrayList<String> getList()
    {
        return list;
    }

    @XmlElement
    public void setList(ArrayList<String> list)
    {
        this.list = list;
    }

    public String getDesc()
    {
        return desc;
    }

    @XmlElement
    public void setDesc(String desc)
    {
        this.desc = desc;
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    @XmlElement
    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public int getAge() {
        return age;
    }

    @XmlElement
    public void setAge(int age) {
        this.age = age;
    }

    public int getId() {
        return id;
    }

    @XmlAttribute
    public void setId(int id) {
        this.id = id;
    }
}

createXML.java

import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.util.ArrayList;

import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext;
import javax.xml.bind.Marshaller;


public class createXML {

    public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception
    {
        ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
        list.add("1");
        list.add("2");
        list.add("3");
        list.add("4");
        Customer c = new Customer();
        c.setAge(45);
        c.setDesc("some desc ");
        c.setId(23);
        c.setList(list);
        c.setName("name");
        JAXBContext jaxbContext = JAXBContext.newInstance(Customer.class);
        Marshaller jaxbMarshaller = jaxbContext.createMarshaller();
        jaxbMarshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
        StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
        jaxbMarshaller.marshal(c, sw);
        String xmlString = sw.toString();
        System.out.println(xmlString);
    }

}

Answer 4

You can use the Marshaler's method for marshaling which takes a Writer as parameter:

marshal(Object,Writer)

and pass it an Implementation which can build a String object

Direct Known Subclasses: BufferedWriter, CharArrayWriter, FilterWriter, OutputStreamWriter, PipedWriter, PrintWriter, StringWriter

Call its toString method to get the actual String value.

So doing:

StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
jaxbMarshaller.marshal(customer, sw);
String xmlString = sw.toString();