JAXB Unmarshalling for type Mixed Content

XML with text and child elements

A Mixed type XML element can contain attributes, elements, and text. For example here is an XML element, "parent", that contains both text and an element “child”.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<parent>
    I am the parent element of mixedtype.
    <child>I am the child element</child>
    I contain both element and value.
</parent>

JAXB Unmarshalling for type Mixed Content

So how will we write the Java class for it. You might think of “parent” as @XmlRootElement and we can get the String inside it by @XmlValue and the child element by @XmlElement. But this won’t work because @XmlValue and @XmlElement can not be used together.

@XmlValue and @XmlElement can not be used together in JAXB

Parent.java

import java.util.*;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*;
@XmlRootElement(name = "parent")

public class Parent{

    protected List<Child> child= new ArrayList<>();
    protected List<String> text= new ArrayList<>();

    @XmlElementRef(name="child",type=Child.class)
    public List<Child> getChild() {
        return child;
    }

    @XmlMixed
    public List<String> getText() {
        return text;
    }

    public void setChild(Child value) {
        this.child.add(value);
    }

    public void setText(String value) {
        this.text.add(value);
    }
}

So for the root element “parent” we are using @XmlMixed annotation for the texts and @XmlElementRef for the “child” element. You can think of the use of @XmlMixed similar to @XmlValue.

Let's take a simple Child class

Child.java

public class Child {
    @XmlValue
    protected String value;

    public String getValue() {
        return value;
    }

    public void setValue(String value) {
        this.value = value;
    }
}

Unmarshalling using JAXBContext:

import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext;
import javax.xml.bind.Unmarshaller;

JAXBContext jaxbContext = JAXBContext.newInstance(Parent.class);
Unmarshaller jaxbUnmarshaller = jaxbContext.createUnmarshaller();
Parent parent = (Parent) jaxbUnmarshaller.unmarshal(new FileInputStream(xmlFile));

Since more than one text content and child element can appear, List<String> and List<Child> are ONLY allowed for mixed content in JAXB. We can get all the texts and child elements from the List. Like this:

System.out.println(text.get(0)); // I am the parent element of mixedtype
System.out.println(text.get(1)); // I contain both element and value.