Is there a JAXB Plugin which generates Builders?

Question

Are you aware of any good JAXB Plugin which generated Builder pattern classes for the generated JAXB classes? Composing domain using JAXB generated classes is really nasty. I saw a plugin someone wrote back in 2010 but it doesn't use the newest maven plugin jaxb2-maven-plugin, and it also requires you to specify bindings for each schema type which is not robust.

Answer 1

The following snippet from a pom.xml file, uses maven cxf-xjc-plugin to generate the JAXB classes and also leverages jaxb-fluent-api to tack-on fluent interfaces ... which aren't exactly a complete builder pattern on their own ... but I think they leave room for folks to make decent headway in that direction.

        <!-- Used to generate source code based on XSD (schema) file -->
        <!-- http://cxf.apache.org/cxf-xjc-plugin.html -->
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.cxf</groupId>
            <artifactId>cxf-xjc-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.7.7</version>
            <configuration>
                <extensions>
                    <extension>net.java.dev.jaxb2-commons:jaxb-fluent-api:2.1.8</extension>
                </extensions>
            </configuration>
            <executions>
                <execution>
                    <id>generate-xsd-sources</id>
                    <phase>generate-sources</phase>
                    <goals>
                        <goal>xsdtojava</goal>
                    </goals>
                    <configuration>
                        <sourceRoot>${basedir}/target/generated-sources/cxf-xjc/</sourceRoot>
                        <xsdOptions>
                            <xsdOption>
                                <xsd>${basedir}/src/main/wsdl/your.xsd</xsd>
                                <packagename>com.your.package.name</packagename>
                                <extensionArgs>
                                    <extensionArg>-Xfluent-api</extensionArg>
                                </extensionArgs>
                            </xsdOption>
                        </xsdOptions>
                    </configuration>
                </execution>
            </executions>
        </plugin>

Answer 2

Yes, there is now a plugin to generate fluent builders for JAXB-generated classes. There is a github project on

https://github.com/mklemm/jaxb2-rich-contract-plugin

It contains a couple of useful JAXB plugins. You can download source and binaries from github, or get maven artifacts from The Central Repository

Hope this helps. If you have any questions, just ask me, I'm the one who started it.