JAXB2 generates getters/setters with primitive types for optional attributes

Question

We are using jaxb2 to generate Java code from xml schema definitions for some external data. The project is quite old and used the maven-jaxb-plugin 1.1.1. We want to update to jaxb2-maven-plugin which will also use jaxb2, but we found some differences in the generated code. Specifically, we have attributes in the form of

    <xsd:attribute name="num" type="xsd:int" use="optional">

which are mapped to Integer fields in the generated code.

@XmlAttribute(name = "num")
protected Integer num;

However, jaxb2 generates getters and setters with primitive type instead of nullable types:

public int getNum() {
    return num;
}

public void setNum(int value) {
    this.num = value;
}

public boolean isSetNum() {
    return (this.num!= null);
}

public void unsetNum() {
    this.num = null;
}

However, our current code assumes that getNum returns a nullable boxed type and also tests this in unit tests which fail with a null pointer exception.

Is there a way to generate getters/setters with nullable types for optional attributes? The xsd files are provided from an external vendor so I would prefer to not modify them. We do not set optionalProperty in <globalBindings>, so the value is the default wrapper.

Answer 1

I think I have a solution to my own question. In addition to optionalProperty in globalBindings, there is the option generateIsSetMethod which controls if methods like isSetNum shall be generated or not. If this is enabled, primitive types such as int will be used instead of Integer.