EclipseLink/UserGuide/MOXy/Simple Values/Special Schema Types/Date and Time Types

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Key API

Date and Time Types

JAXB and Date/Time Properties In this post I will describe how JAXB handles date/time information. This post will also cover how the @XmlSchemaType annotation can be used to customize the XML representation.

XML Schema (date.xsd)

The following XML schema will be used for this post. Note that the date-of-birth element is of type xsd:date.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <xsd:schema

   xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

   <xsd:element name="customer">
       <xsd:complexType>
           <xsd:sequence>
               <xsd:element
                   name="date-of-birth"
                   type="xsd:date"
                   minOccurs="0"/>
           </xsd:sequence>
       </xsd:complexType>
   </xsd:element>

</xsd:schema>

Generated Model - XMLGregorianCalendar Property

From this XML schema we can generate a class model using the following XJC call:

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xjc -d out -p blog.date date.xsd

This will result in a Customer class that looks like the following. There are a couple of interesting things to note:

  1. The dateOfBirth property is of type javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar.  
  2. The use of @XmlSchemaType. 

Some Java data types (like XMLGregorianCalendar) have multiple XML representations (like xsd:date, xsd:time, xsd:dateTime, etc.) and @XmlSchemaType is used to choose the desired representation.

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package blog.date;

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlSchemaType; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlType; import javax.xml.datatype.XMLGregorianCalendar;

@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) @XmlType(name = "", propOrder = {"dateOfBirth"}) @XmlRootElement(name = "customer") public class Customer {

   @XmlElement(name = "date-of-birth")
   @XmlSchemaType(name = "date")
   protected XMLGregorianCalendar dateOfBirth;

   public XMLGregorianCalendar getDateOfBirth() {
       return dateOfBirth;
   }

   public void setDateOfBirth(XMLGregorianCalendar value) {
       this.dateOfBirth = value;
   }

}

User Defined - Date (or Calendar) Property

Even though the JAXB XML schema to Java compiler (XJC) generates a property of type XMLGregorianCalendar by default, you are free to use java.util.Date and java.util.Calendar as well.

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package blog.date;

import java.util.Date;

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement; import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlSchemaType;

@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD) @XmlRootElement(name = "customer") public class Customer {

   @XmlElement(name = "date-of-birth")
   @XmlSchemaType(name = "date")
   protected Date dateOfBirth;

   public Date getDateOfBirth() {
       return dateOfBirth;
   }

   public void setDateOfBirth(Date value) {
       this.dateOfBirth = value;
   }

}

EclipseLink JAXB (MOXy) Extension

EclipseLink JAXB (MOXy) also supports the following types which are not covered in the JAXB specification (JSR-222):

   * java.sql.Date
   * java.sql.Time
   * java.sql.Timestamp

Version: 2.2.0 Draft
Other versions...

Special Schema Types	Special Schema Types	Binary Types
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