JAXB + Maven – Xml to Java

Situation

Assume there’s a situation where you want to generate Java sources from a xml schema definition (xsd). And generate it constantly whenever you want it if the xsd’s got updated.

Solution

There are quiet a few out tools/libs out there but I found this particulate set (Maven and JAXB2) works well for me, just because it’s pretty straight forward. But you may prefer a different approach.

In to the action

Let’s create a very basic maven project (assume you have already set up Maven and Java)

mvn archetype:generate -DgroupId={com.jaxb.hello} -DartifactId={HelloJAXB2}
 -DarchetypeArtifactId=maven-archetype-quickstart  -DinteractiveMode=false

Once the project is created open the pom.xml file in edit mode and add following two plugins

• JAXB-2 Maven Plugin
• Maven Source Plugin

[Since this is a sample project you may have to define the maven <plugins /> sections]

Carefully notice the sections

<generatePackage> defines the place where you want to put the generated sources for the xsd’s

<schemaIncludes> defines the place where you place your .xsd files.

Now keep all that in mine lets see the project structure

As you can see I just added a single .xsd to the location helloschema/

Once all these are in place you just have run the Maven target.

mvn package

[Here I have skipped the tests for the convenience]

If everything goes smoothly you’ll see two .jar files in the target folder

Sources are bundled in the HelloJAXB2-1.1-SNAPSHOT-sources.jar

and you can find it also in generated-sources folder as well