Avoiding character encoding in Apache Abdera

Question

I'm working to write a simple article editor which will be used with a CMS system which offers an Atom API to add/edit articles. To communicate with the CMS, I am using the Apache Abdera library. But I'm running into a problem with character encoding. The data sent to the CMS will be encoded like this:

<entry>
  <content xmlns:vdf="http://www.vizrt.com/types" type="xml">
    <vdf:payload>
      <vdf:field name="body">
        <vdf:value>&lt;div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">&lt;p>Text comes here&lt;/p>&lt;/div></vdf:value>
      </vdf:field>
    </vdf:payload>
  </content>
</entry>

But the CMS system requires this:

<entry>
  <content xmlns:vdf="http://www.vizrt.com/types" type="xml">
    <vdf:payload>
      <vdf:field name="body">
        <vdf:value><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Text comes here</p></div></vdf:value>
      </vdf:field>
    </vdf:payload>
  </content>
</entry>

In other words, no character escaping. Does anyone know how this can be achieved using Apache Abdera?

Answer 1

I'm not entirely familiar with abdera's internals and therefore can't explain exactly what is happening here, but I think the essence is that you can not use Strings or plain text as values if you don't want abdera to escape stuff. Instead, you must use an Element with abdera-type XHtml.

Something like this worked for me:

String body = "<p>Text comes here</p>"

//put the text into an XHtml-Element (more specificly an instance of Div)
//I "misuse" a Content object here, because Content offers type=XHtml. Maybe there are better ways.
Element el = abdera.getFactory().newContent(Content.Type.XHTML).setValue(body).getValueElement();

//now create your empty <vdf:value/> node.
QName valueQName = new QName("http://your-vdf-namespace", "value", "vdf");
ExtensibleElement bodyValue = new ExtensibleElementWrapper(abdera.getFactory(),valueQName);

//now attach the Div to that empty node. Not sure what's happening here internally, but this worked for me :)
bodyValue.addExtension(el);

Now, bodyValue can be used as value to your field and Abdera should render everything properly.