javaxmlantjaxbcastor

Can Castor handle class generation from multiple XSDs importing from a base XSD?


I have several XSDs that reuse the same entities. For example, both the XSDs for the ProductPurchaseRequest.xsd and ProductQuoteRequest.xsd both have a <product> tag in them to describe the product in question. For this reason I created a Product.xsd file to define the <product> tag and both ProductPurchaseRequest.xsd and ProductQuoteRequest.xsd import the Product.xsd with a `.

I would like to use Castor to generate Java classes from theses XSDs, and for both of them to use the same class for representing the Product so that I could reuse the same logic for mapping them to our model's ProductModel class.

Can Castor do this? If so, what would be the Ant task syntax for it. If not, would perhaps JAXB be a better alternative?


Solution

  • So I was able to get the whole thing working using the JAXB reference implementation. The trick was to realise that the download from JAXB site is a downloader and not the actual libraries! Double-click to accept the licence and the libraries will download locally. Created a test folder (JAXB_TEST) and copied all the downloaded .jars to a lib subfolder. I put all my XSDs in XSD subfolder. After that I ran the following Ant build.xml file.

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <project name="jaxb_test" basedir="." default="package" >
    
        <taskdef name="xjc" classname="com.sun.tools.xjc.XJCTask">
            <classpath>
                <fileset dir="./lib" includes="*.jar" />
            </classpath>
        </taskdef>
    
        <target name="generate">
            <delete dir="./gen-src" />
            <mkdir dir="./gen-src" />
    
            <xjc destdir="./gen-src" language="XMLSCHEMA" package="com.mmm" >
                <schema dir="./xsd" includes="EPC*.xsd" />
            </xjc>      
        </target>
    
        <target name="compile" depends="generate" >
            <delete dir="./bin" />
            <mkdir dir="./bin" />
    
            <javac srcdir="./gen-src" destdir="./bin" includeantruntime="false" />
        </target>
    
        <target name="package" depends="compile" >
            <delete dir="./dist" />
            <mkdir dir="./dist" />
            <jar destfile="./dist/jaxb-gen.jar" basedir="./bin" />
        </target>   
    
    
    </project>
    

    The only problem I had was that I had an xsd with a root tag called <product> that anonymous extended the Product type to add a version attribute (which I always like to have on my root tag's) which was causing a name conflict for JAXB. So instead, I turned the anonymous type into a named type (i.e. TopLevelProduct) and set the root to that type and JAXB was happy with that.