On Aug 30, 2010, at 5:12 PM, John Calcote wrote:
> On 8/30/2010 3:19 AM, Paul Sandoz wrote:
>>
>> On Aug 27, 2010, at 8:37 PM, Tatu Saloranta wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> IIRC JAXB will automatically use base64 encoding for byte[].
>>
>> One, perhaps obvious thing to point out, is make sure the characters
>> of the XML document are converted to an appropriate character
>> encoding
>> agreed on both sides e.g. UTF-8.
>
> Thanks Paul. That has been considered. I'm leaning toward using byte[]
> at this point. The only real problem with this format is that the
> base64
> encoding makes it a bit difficult to see what's in the message at a
> glance. I was hoping that String would be a good choice for this
> reason
> alone.
>
Yes, is it less visible in that regard. Although when using a string
you may find all those < and > make one go a little cross eyed :-)
Paul.