JAXB, Custom bindings, Adapter1.class and Joda-time
09:37 20 Sep 2012

I have a problem with the way JAXB is generating the bound classes for an XML schema (which, for sake of precision, I cannot modify). I want to map a xsd:date type to a Joda-time LocalDate object and, reading here, here and here, I created the following DateAdapter class:

public class DateAdapter extends XmlAdapter {
    private static DateTimeFormatter fmt = DateTimeFormat.forPattern("yyyyMMdd");

    public LocalDate unmarshal(String v) throws Exception {
        return fmt.parseLocalDate(v);
    }

    public String marshal(LocalDate v) throws Exception {
        return v.toString("yyyyMMdd");
    }
}

And I added the following to my global binding file:

  
        
    

The problem is that, when I try to maven compile my project, it fails with the following error:

[ERROR] \My\Path\MyProject\target\generated-sources\xjc\my\classes\generated\Adapter1.java:[20,59] non-static method unmarshal(java.lang.String) cannot be referenced from a static context
[ERROR] \My\Path\MyProject\target\generated-sources\xjc\my\classes\generated\Adapter1.java:[24,59] non-static method marshal(org.joda.time.LocalDate) cannot be referenced from a static context

...and this is where things get weird. JAXB generates a class Adapter1 that contains the following:

public class Adapter1
    extends XmlAdapter
{


    public LocalDate unmarshal(String value) {
        return (my.classes.adapters.DateAdapter.unmarshal(value));
    }

    public String marshal(LocalDate value) {
        return (my.classes.adapters.DateAdapter.marshal(value));
    }

}

....which is the source of the compilation error.

Now, my questions are:

  • being that my adapter is overriding XmlAdapter, I cannot make the methods static, how do I avoid this?
  • Can I avoid the generation of Adapter1.class altogether ? Maybe using package-level annotation XmlJavaTypeAdapters, and if so, how do I do it exactly ? (JAXB generates already a package-info.java of its own)
java binding annotations jaxb