Jakarta Commons Cookbook

6.9. Turning XML Documents into Beans

Problem

You need to convert an XML document into a Bean.

Solution

Use Betwixt’s BeanReader to parse an XML document and create an instance of the appropriate bean. Register bean classes with the BeanReader, and parse an XML document loaded from an InputStream, InputSource, or Reader. The following XML document will be parsed into the Play and Character beans introduced in Recipe 6.2:

<play genre="tragedy" year="1603" language="english">
  <author>William Shakespeare</author>
  <character protagonist="false">
    <description>King of Denmark</description>
    <name>Claudius</name>
  </character>
  <character protagonist="true">
    <description>Son to the late, and nephew of the present king</description>
    <name>Hamlet</name>
  </character>
  <character protagonist="false">
    <description>friend to Hamlet</description>
    <name>Horatio</name>
  </character>
  <name>Hamlet</name>
  <summary>Prince of Denmark (Hamlet) freaks out, talks to father's ghost, and
    finally dies in a duel.</summary>
</play>

This XML document was created with BeanWriter, using the customized format from Recipe 6.8. To read this XML document with BeanReader, the Play class will need to be registered with BeanReader and the XMLIntrospector must have the same settings as the XMLIntrospector used when writing the document with BeanWriter. The following code instantiates and configures a BeanReader to read this customized XML for the Play object:

import org.apache.commons.betwixt.io.BeanReader; InputStream customPlay ...