Using Marshaller and Unmarshaller

You can use Spring’s OXM for a wide variety of situations. In the following example, we use it to marshal the settings of a Spring-managed application as an XML file. In the following example, we use a simple JavaBean to represent the settings:

Java
public class Settings {

	private boolean fooEnabled;

	public boolean isFooEnabled() {
		return fooEnabled;
	}

	public void setFooEnabled(boolean fooEnabled) {
		this.fooEnabled = fooEnabled;
	}
}
Kotlin
class Settings {
	var isFooEnabled: Boolean = false
}

The application class uses this bean to store its settings. Besides a main method, the class has two methods: saveSettings() saves the settings bean to a file named settings.xml, and loadSettings() loads these settings again. The following main() method constructs a Spring application context and calls these two methods:

Java
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.FileOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.oxm.Marshaller;
import org.springframework.oxm.Unmarshaller;

public class Application {

	private static final String FILE_NAME = "settings.xml";
	private Settings settings = new Settings();
	private Marshaller marshaller;
	private Unmarshaller unmarshaller;

	public void setMarshaller(Marshaller marshaller) {
		this.marshaller = marshaller;
	}

	public void setUnmarshaller(Unmarshaller unmarshaller) {
		this.unmarshaller = unmarshaller;
	}

	public void saveSettings() throws IOException {
		try (FileOutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(FILE_NAME)) {
			this.marshaller.marshal(settings, new StreamResult(os));
		}
	}

	public void loadSettings() throws IOException {
		try (FileInputStream is = new FileInputStream(FILE_NAME)) {
			this.settings = (Settings) this.unmarshaller.unmarshal(new StreamSource(is));
		}
	}

	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
		ApplicationContext appContext =
				new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("applicationContext.xml");
		Application application = (Application) appContext.getBean("application");
		application.saveSettings();
		application.loadSettings();
	}
}
Kotlin
class Application {

	lateinit var marshaller: Marshaller

	lateinit var unmarshaller: Unmarshaller

	fun saveSettings() {
		FileOutputStream(FILE_NAME).use { outputStream -> marshaller.marshal(settings, StreamResult(outputStream)) }
	}

	fun loadSettings() {
		FileInputStream(FILE_NAME).use { inputStream -> settings = unmarshaller.unmarshal(StreamSource(inputStream)) as Settings }
	}
}

private const val FILE_NAME = "settings.xml"

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
	val appContext = ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("applicationContext.xml")
	val application = appContext.getBean("application") as Application
	application.saveSettings()
	application.loadSettings()
}

The Application requires both a marshaller and an unmarshaller property to be set. We can do so by using the following applicationContext.xml:

<beans>
	<bean id="application" class="Application">
		<property name="marshaller" ref="xstreamMarshaller" />
		<property name="unmarshaller" ref="xstreamMarshaller" />
	</bean>
	<bean id="xstreamMarshaller" class="org.springframework.oxm.xstream.XStreamMarshaller"/>
</beans>

This application context uses XStream, but we could have used any of the other marshaller instances described later in this chapter. Note that, by default, XStream does not require any further configuration, so the bean definition is rather simple. Also note that the XStreamMarshaller implements both Marshaller and Unmarshaller, so we can refer to the xstreamMarshaller bean in both the marshaller and unmarshaller property of the application.

This sample application produces the following settings.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<settings foo-enabled="false"/>