On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 11:17 AM, John Calcote <john.calcote_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> This is more a JAXB question than a Jersey question, but I was hoping
> someone on this list might be willing to impart hard-earned knowledge...
>
> I have a situation where I want to send an xml document as a field in a
> JAXB message. I don't want JAXB to know anything about the contents of
> this field - specifically, I don't want JAXB to marshall this field to
> and from XML. I just want to treat it as raw XML. The reasons for this
> have to do with the layers in our code that interpret the contents of
> this field. I'm using JAXB at the lowest layer, but the field contents
> are injected at one end from a much higher layer, and consumed from that
> same higher layer at the end of the transmission. Thus, from the message
> transport's perspective, I want it to appear to just be raw text.
>
> I've spoken with colleagues about this problem. One says you should use
> byte array to keep JAXB from messing with the encoding of the embedded
> xml text. Another says String should would fine.
It sort of depends -- serializing things as Strings is fine in that it
gets back and forth ok (well, assuming it does not have characters
that are invalid in XML; which is true for regular text, and false for
binary stuff). It does get escaped with regular character entity
replacement to get rid of unquoted less-thans and ampersands.
If so, you should be fine. Otherwise byte[] should work as long as
JAXB implementation knows to use base64; I think there was some
annotation to help with it, but can't remember what that would be.
-+ Tatu +-