Monday, January 30, 2012

Generating hashCode() and equals() when creating Java classes using Mojo Jaxb2 maven plugin


The code I'm working on is using jaxb2-maven-plugin from org.codehaus.mojo to generate Java classes from XSD schema. I'm looking for a way to automatically implement equals() and hashCode() methods for those classes, but it seems there is not a way. I know that there are other JAXB2 Maven plugins that do that (http://confluence.highsource.org/display/J2B/Home for example), but I was wondering if anyone of you encountered this issue before and if there's a way for fixing it. I'm generating the classes using the xjc goal.


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  1. UserJanuary 30, 2012 at 7:49 PM

    I would strongly disagree with using JAXB generated classes as business objects in your code. The classes that are generated by JAXB are beans that are just meant to essentially move element information from the xml file, to the bean's fields. I personally always have my SOAP service convert these generated bean classes to my actual business objects, as XML->Java and vice versa conversion is not black and white all the time. Note that this is my personal opinion, and would love for some others to weigh in on what they do in this situation.

    To answer your question though, use a different plug in, or just your use your IDE to make some equals and hashCode methods.

    Hope that helps.

    EDIT:

    I forgot to put my reasoning for this, apologies. Let us say in the next version of your project you want to add some more behavior to your JAXB generated classes, but also want to make some changes to your schema. Now you are regenerating the JAXB generated classes, putting the old behaviors back in, and making your application far more susceptible to bugs in my opinion. The JAXB generated classes are supposed to reflect your XML schema types (and thus your SOAP messages) not your business logic. Hope that makes sense.

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