Description Blaise Doughan 2010-07-06 16:17:35 EDT

Below is the current method for bootstrapping the EclipseLink JAXBContext with externalized metadata:

  Map<String, Source> metadata = new HashMap<String,Source>();
  metadata.put("example.order", new StreamSource("order-metadata.xml"));
  metadata.put("example.customer", new StreamSource("customer-metadata.xml"));

  Map<String,Object> properties = new HashMap<String,Object>();
  properties.put(JAXBContextFactory.ECLIPSELINK_OXM_XML_KEY, metadata);

  JAXBContext.newInstance("example.order:example.customer", aClassLoader, properties);

This is a bit bulky considering most JAXB applications involve a single package.  Offering the following would be more convenient:

  Map<String,Object> properties = new HashMap<String,Object>();
  properties.put(JAXBContextFactory.ECLIPSELINK_OXM_XML_KEY, new StreamSource("order-metadata.xml"));

  JAXBContext.newInstance("example.order:example.customer", aClassLoader, properties);

This could even be simplified further:

  Map<String,Object> properties = new HashMap<String,Object>();
  properties.put(JAXBContextFactory.ECLIPSELINK_OXM_XML_KEY, "order-metadata.xml");

  JAXBContext.newInstance("example.order:example.customer", aClassLoader, properties);


To achieve this simplication, I believe the following should be done:

1.  Add a package name to the xml-bindings element.  If specified on bindings the packange name would not need to be included in the individual java-type elements (package should be prepended to java-type name).
2.  The context path (package) can be retrieved from the XmlBindings object.
3.  We should allow the metadata file to be specified in more formats than Source, include (stream, string, etc)