How to ignore a field while serializing

Question

I have a xsd schema where I have added a new field owner_email in the Cart object. I want this within our application when I am sending Cart Object to other system (as json request) or returning Cart object as response (as json) i don't want to pass owner_email field. Is there any attribute that I can set for owner_email field?

<xs:complexType name="Cart">
    <xs:sequence>
        <xs:element name="id" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
        <xs:element name="name" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
        <xs:element name="owner_id" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
        <xs:element name="owner_email" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
    </xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>

Here i am not editing the generated java code. I need to modify the xsd file itself. what is the attribute i should use in xsd to specify the same.

I am looking for xsd element to add that jsonignore or any other approach not to serialize. But the other question has the java annotation to mark a field not to serialize. — Kiran, Feb 08 '18 at 01:36
Have you tried using @XmlTransient annotation in java POJO ? — AmanSinghal, Feb 08 '18 at 02:06
I don't touch the java pojo since those files are generated by JAXB. I should change only in XSD files. — Kiran, Feb 08 '18 at 03:58

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 12 '18 at 09:41

I have a way to make it work, but there are 2 "gotchas" that I am not very pleased with.

First, changing your xsd to this:

<xs:element name="Cart">
        <xs:complexType>
            <xs:all>
                <xs:element name="id" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
                <xs:element name="name" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
                <xs:element name="owner_id" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
                <xs:element  name="ownerEmail" type="xs:string" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" />
            </xs:all>
        </xs:complexType>
    </xs:element>

And then you can create bindings file to generate the transient annotation as mentioned to you by other users:

<jxb:bindings
        xmlns:jxb="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb"
        xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
        xmlns:xjc="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb/xjc"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xmlns:annox="http://annox.dev.java.net"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb/bindingschema_2_0.xsd"
        jxb:extensionBindingPrefixes="xjc annox" version="2.1">

    <jxb:bindings schemaLocation="../xsd/cart.xsd">
        <jxb:bindings node="//xs:element[@name='Cart']//xs:complexType//xs:all//xs:element[@name='ownerEmail']">
            <annox:annotate target="field">
                <annox:annotate annox:class="javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlTransient" />
            </annox:annotate>
        </jxb:bindings>
    </jxb:bindings>
</jxb:bindings>

This would generate when marshaling the following xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<Cart>
    <id>id</id>
    <name>name</name>
    <owner_id>owner id</owner_id>
</Cart>

The gotchas:

The sequence of elements became xs:all, if not it would create a propOrder in the POJO and this would also list the transient field and would cause problems
Renamed field "owner_email" to "ownerEmail" because the first version would generate (along with transient) @XmlElement with the owner_email name and have the field according to naming conventions.

I will try to see if I can find workaround for these but for now maybe this helps. Cheers!

May be this will work. i did not try the approach. instead i decided to go with other solution where i don't set these new fields in xsd. Thank you for your response Mart. — Kiran, Feb 15 '18 at 00:25

How to ignore a field while serializing

1 Answers1