How to prevent generation of xml 'nil' elements in soap webservice client?

Question

I have an autogenerated soap webservice client (using cxf), and some elements are marked to be optional.

If I do not set these elements, the XML request send to the webservice has lot's of elements as follows:

<PayText xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:nil="true"/>
<Name xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:nil="true"/>

These are generated if the wsdl contains:

minOccurs="0" nillable="true"

How can I prevent the generation of these nil elements? Probably the webservice itself does not need this information, as when I use soapUI and the send the pure xml requests stripping out the nil elements, the request still works.

My binding file:

<jaxb:globalBindings generateElementProperty="false" />

So, how can I prevent them being generated during send?

Albertson

Possible duplicate (at least a relevant question with answer): #5898285 – Zackaryzacks

Not really. I have neither control of the wsdl (I'm just the client), nor on the autogenerated classes (as they must be regenerated every time a wsdl update takes place). – Albertson

Well, in that case you're probably out of luck because of the 'nillable=true' which is present in the WSDL. – Zackaryzacks

Did you find any solution to this problem? – Perceptual

Answer 1

If an element is minOccurs="0" and nillable="true" then the generated property type will be a JAXBElement, something like JAXBElement<String>. When that property is null it will be excluded from the marshalled XML (null corresponds to minOccurs="0"). To get xsi:nil="true" you need to have an instance of JAXBElement with nil set to true.

Chirk

So it is due to my <jaxb:globalBindings generateElementProperty="false" />? I want to prevent working with JAXBElement, but have the property directly, that's why I work with generateElementProperty = false. It it then impossible to remove the nil elements from the marshalled xml, as they are generated as consequence of the property?? – Albertson

This is one of the cases where JAXBElement is useful. Without it the property will be annotated with @XmlElement(nillable=true) will cause the behaviour you are seeing. Why don't you want to use JAXBElement? – Chirk

I'm preventing the use of jaxbelement to have one less element property to walk when accessing the autogenerated element properties. Could it be generally said if JAXBElement should be used in a project or not? – Albertson

And also, I just can create the classes themself, not having to go through the way new ObjectFactory().createTheElement("test");. – Albertson