JAXB with an adapter: Date formatting example

So, moving along from the absolute basics, I will now demonstrate how to add an adapter for formatting.

We had a kennel class which contained a list of puppies.  Each puppy has a birthday and a timestamp when it arrived in the kennel.  These are both of the type XMLGregorianCalendar but I would rather have use Joda LocalDate and LocalDateTime. Therefore I add an adapter which is called when the contents of the <birthday> and <timestamp> tags are unmarshalled.

The DateAdapter.java has two static methods, unmarshal and marshal, which convert a string to a LocalDate and vice versa respectively.

	package com.ojha.jaxb.kennel.generated;
	import org.joda.time.LocalDate;
	import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormat;
	import org.joda.time.format.DateTimeFormatter;
	public class DateAdapter {
	private static DateTimeFormatter dateFormatter = DateTimeFormat
	.forPattern("dd-MM-yyyy");
	public static LocalDate unmarshal(final String date) {
	return dateFormatter.parseLocalDate(date);
	}
	public static String marshal(LocalDate date) {
	return date.toString("yyyy-MM-dd");
	}
	}

view raw gistfile1.java hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Run it to generate the code:

xjc ../resources/puppy/kennel.xsd -p com.ojha.jaxb.kennel.generated

	<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
	<xs:schema version="1.0" attributeFormDefault="unqualified"
	elementFormDefault="qualified" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
	xmlns:jaxb="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/jaxb" jaxb:version="2.1">
	<xs:annotation>
	<xs:appinfo>
	<jaxb:globalBindings>
	<jaxb:javaType name="org.joda.time.LocalDate" xmlType="xs:date"
	parseMethod="DateAdapter.unmarshal" printMethod="DateAdapter.marshal" />
	<jaxb:javaType name="org.joda.time.LocalDateTime"
	xmlType="xs:dateTime" parseMethod="DateTimeAdapter.unmarshal"
	printMethod="DateTimeAdapter.marshal" />
	</jaxb:globalBindings>
	</xs:appinfo>
	</xs:annotation>
	<xs:element name="kennel" type="kennel" />
	<xs:complexType name="kennel">
	<xs:sequence>
	<xs:element name="puppy" type="puppy" maxOccurs="unbounded" />
	</xs:sequence>
	</xs:complexType>
	<xs:complexType name="puppy">
	<xs:sequence>
	<xs:element type="xs:string" name="puppyName" />
	<xs:element type="xs:date" name="puppyBirthday" />
	<xs:element type="xs:dateTime" name="timeStamp" />
	</xs:sequence>
	</xs:complexType>
	</xs:schema>

view raw gistfile1.xml hosted with ❤ by GitHub

The DateAdapter generates an Adapter1.java