Castor unmarshalling problem

[zakhrim]

Hello everybody,
I'm having a problem with Castor unmarshalling: it doesn't resolve correctly the name of classes placed in different packages.

I explain: in my project i got two packages

myProject.entities
                       MyEntity
myProject.schema
                       SaveMyEntityRequest

The object SaveMyEntityRequest has a field of type MyEntity. When I send this request, Castor tries to unmarshall the inner property of SaveMyEntityRequest as a myProject.schema.MyEntity object resulting in a MarshaException, even if in the Castor mapping file I specifield

<class name="myProject.entities.MyEntity" auto-complete="false">
  <map-to name="MyEntity"....>
  ......
</class>

<class name="myProject.schema.saveMyEntityRequest"  auto-complete="false">
  <map-tp name="SaveMyEntityRequest"......>
  <field name="entity" type="myProject.entities.MyEntity">
    <bind-xml name="entity" node="element" />
  </field>
  ......
</class>

The error message i receive is

Castor unmarshalling exception: unable to find FieldDescriptor for 'entity' in
ClassDescriptor of SaveMyEntityRequest; nested exception is
org.exolab.castor.xml.MarshalException: unable to find FieldDescriptor for 'entity' in
ClassDescriptor of SaveMyEntityRequest

I know it looks like a Castor issue, but I didn't find any info in Castor documentation.

Thanks
Ste

[petersk]

This has to do with a class description resolver. I'm now searching about how to implement it. If you found out, could you please post it?
Kurt

[petersk]

Castor unmarshalling wasn't working with spring's objects so I had to switch to "non-spring" code, shown below. I tried using casing the unmarshaller to the oxm.castor.CastoerMarshaller.setTargetClass, but that didn't work.

public Object parseString(StringBuffer xMLToConvert, java.lang.Class<?> cl) {
		Object tTI = new Object();
		Logger logger = Logger.getLogger("MCMApplication");
		StringReader inStr = null;
		XMLContext context = new XMLContext();
		org.exolab.castor.xml.Unmarshaller unm = context.createUnmarshaller();
		unm.setClass(cl);
		try {
			inStr = new StringReader(xMLToConvert.toString());
			//tTI = this.getUnmarshaller().unmarshal(new StreamSource(inStr));

			tTI = unm.unmarshal(inStr);	

		} catch (MarshalException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		} catch (ValidationException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		finally {
			if (inStr != null) {
				inStr.close();
			}
		}

		logger.trace("Finished Marshalling...");

		return tTI;
	}

Does anyone have any idea how I could do the same thing with Spring? I was originally using the one line commented out in the try/catch block to unmarshal and kept getting "could not find class" error.

It should note that the commented line DOES work fine with a mapping file.
Kurt

[zakhrim]

Hi Kurt
I yet found a solution.
You have to specify the schema in the field of the request.

<class name="myProject.entities.MyEntity" auto-complete="false">
  <map-to name="MyEntity".... ns-uri="http://uri.com">
  ......
</class>

<class name="myProject.schema.saveMyEntityRequest"  auto-complete="false">
  <map-tp name="SaveMyEntityRequest"......>
  <field name="entity" type="myProject.entities.MyEntity">
    <bind-xml name="entity" node="element" xmlns="http://uri.com" />
  </field>
  ......
</class>

The DTD validation could mark it as an error, but it is not.
You could comment the DTD specification.
With this, I didn't write any code to customize the (un)marshalling: I used the standard Castor marshaller provided by Spring.

Hope this can help you
Ste

PS: Furthermore, I found out that you'd better specify always the xmlns when the field is a complex object that has its own mapping file, above all if you are working with multiple namespaces.