[java] How to read and write xml files?

The answers only cover DOM / SAX and a copy paste implementation of a JAXB example.

However, one big area of when you are using XML is missing. In many projects / programs there is a need to store / retrieve some basic data structures. Your program has already a classes for your nice and shiny business objects / data structures, you just want a comfortable way to convert this data to a XML structure so you can do more magic on it (store, load, send, manipulate with XSLT).

This is where XStream shines. You simply annotate the classes holding your data, or if you do not want to change those classes, you configure a XStream instance for marshalling (objects -> xml) or unmarshalling (xml -> objects).

Internally XStream uses reflection, the readObject and readResolve methods of standard Java object serialization.

You get a good and speedy tutorial here:

To give a short overview of how it works, I also provide some sample code which marshalls and unmarshalls a data structure. The marshalling / unmarshalling happens all in the main method, the rest is just code to generate some test objects and populate some data to them. It is super simple to configure the xStream instance and marshalling / unmarshalling is done with one line of code each.

import java.math.BigDecimal;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import com.thoughtworks.xstream.XStream;

public class XStreamIsGreat {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    XStream xStream = new XStream();
    xStream.alias("good", Good.class);
    xStream.alias("pRoDuCeR", Producer.class);
    xStream.alias("customer", Customer.class);

    Producer a = new Producer("Apple");
    Producer s = new Producer("Samsung");
    Customer c = new Customer("Someone").add(new Good("S4", 10, new BigDecimal(600), s))
        .add(new Good("S4 mini", 5, new BigDecimal(450), s)).add(new Good("I5S", 3, new BigDecimal(875), a));
    String xml = xStream.toXML(c); // objects -> xml
    System.out.println("Marshalled:\n" + xml);
    Customer unmarshalledCustomer = (Customer)xStream.fromXML(xml); // xml -> objects
  }

  static class Good {
    Producer producer;

    String name;

    int quantity;

    BigDecimal price;

    Good(String name, int quantity, BigDecimal price, Producer p) {
      this.producer = p;
      this.name = name;
      this.quantity = quantity;
      this.price = price;
    }

  }

  static class Producer {
    String name;

    public Producer(String name) {
      this.name = name;
    }
  }

  static class Customer {
    String name;

    public Customer(String name) {
      this.name = name;
    }

    List<Good> stock = new ArrayList<Good>();

    Customer add(Good g) {
      stock.add(g);
      return this;
    }
  }
}