jaxb-inherit

Small JAXB plugin to allow specific JAXB generated classes to extend from a base class, or implement one or more interfaces. It is based on the inheritance plugin found in JAXB2-commons, but does not require any external library.

License

This code is licensed under the Apache-2.0 license, see http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html.

Building

The project can be built with Ant by running ant build jar. The resulting JAR can be found in the generated folder. Run ant clean to clean up all generated stuff.

To make this project totally standalone, a copy of the jaxb-xjc.jar (taken from the JAXB 2.2.6 reference implementation, see [1]) is included in this project inside the lib directory.

Usage

Bindings

To use the jaxb-inherit plugin in your JAXB bindings, you need first to declare it in the preamble of your bindings file:

<jxb:bindings
    version="1.0"
    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:inherit="http://www.lxtreme.nl/xml/ns/jaxb/inherit"
    jxb:extensionBindingPrefixes="xjc inherit">
...

After this, you can use it as follows:

<jxb:bindings node="//xs:complexType[@name='MyComplexType']">
    <inherit:extends name="java.util.Observable" />
    <inherit:implements name="java.io.Serializable" />
</jxb:bindings>

As a result, the generated MyComplexType class should extend from java.util.Observable and implement the java.io.Serializable interface.

XJC

First, you need a JAXB installation unpacked somewhere on your local disk, and have an environment setting named "JAXB_HOME" pointing to this location.

Add the "jaxb-inherit-1.0.0.jar" to the classpath of XJC, like -classpath /path/to/jaxb-inherit-1.0.0.jar.

Enable custom extensions and, most importantly, the jaxb-inherit extension by adding -extension -Xinherit as arguments to your XJC script.

For convenience, a simple shell script is available in the root of this project that shows one way of running XJC with the jaxb-inherit plugin enabled.

References and links

JAXB reference implementation: http://jaxb.java.net/;
JAXB2-commons library: https://jaxb2-commons.java.net.