[Resteasy-developers] JAXB and JSON Provider Configuration

[Ryan J. M. <ry...@da...>]

I'm finishing up the changes to the JAXB providers and had some  
thoughts on the JSON Providers:

Current, the providers utilize a customized JAXBContext by extending  
JAXBContext. There is a separate Context class for each of Jettisons  
JSON conventions. Additionally, there's a custom marshaller and  
unmarshaller for each convention type. What i'd like to do is either  
get rid of the custom context and supporting completely or  
consolidating the 2 context classes into one. We could easily handle  
the Jettison mapping conventions via property configuration rather  
than multiple classes.

As far as configuration goes, I've also been tinkering with the idea  
of an additional annotation that can used on resource classes and  
methods. For example:

@JSONConfig(value = JSONConvention.MAPPED,
             ignoredElements = "foo")
public class OrderResource { ...

This would instruct the JSONProviders to use the mapped convention and  
ignore <foo> elements. Additionally, we can also pass a array of  
JSONToXml annotations that provides some fine grained control over  
mapping process.

On a related note, I also have an additional JAXBConfig annotation  
which provides the following:

@JAXBConfig(packages = "org.jboss.resteasy.test.providers.jaxb.data",
             useNameSpacePrefix  = true,
             validate = true,
             namespaces =
                @XmlNs(
                   namespaceURI = "http://jboss.org/resteasy/test/providers/jaxb/generated/order 
",
                   prefix = "o"))
@JSONConfig(value = JSONConvention.MAPPED,
             ignoredElements = "foo")
public class OrderResource { ...

The useNameSpacePrefix attribute instructs RESTEasy to output the XML  
using a namespace prefix. If the package is annotated with an  
@XmlSchema annotation containing an @XmlNs annotation, the namespace  
prefix will be lifted from there. However, the namespaces array will  
take precedence over the package annotation. The packages attribute  
allows you specify multiple package names. The validate attribute will  
validate the XML against a provided XML schema (attribute TBD).

I have most of this working at the moment but still need some more  
time to wrap it up, but I wanted to get some feeler about the  
aproaches here before continuing.

Ryan-