Re: [xml-dev] Best way to create an XML document

[Robert Koberg <rob@koberg.com>]

On Sat, 2008-04-12 at 20:50 +0100, Andrew Welch wrote:
> I was looking for the "top down" approach where you annotate a class
> it just creates the XML for you, as opposed to the "bottom up"
> approach where you supply the schema and it autogenerates the classes.
> 
> Ideally you should be able to just annotate a class with something
> like @XMLEntity, pass it to the entity manager's save() method and
> have it create the XML for you - just like JPA  :)
> 

This shouldn't be too hard. Something like:

@XMLEntity("path/to/my-file.xml")

and the annotation processor just goes through the non-transient fields
creating:

<ClassName>
  <field1>field1 value</field1>
  <set>
    <foo>...
    <foo>...
  </set>
etc..
</ClassName>

It has also made me rethink putting my metadata for forms/UI in a
hibernate mapping file (@XMLEntityForm). It would seem like a good
compile time annotation to generate a form/js 'stub' that can be
included in a transformation later in the build process. I would still
need method level annotations (a lot could be done with the existing JPA
and/or hibernate annotations). hmmm... I think I will work on these in
the next few days.

thanks for making me think :)
-Rob