System Mobile, Inc

At a recent event in Denver, some of our integration partners complained about the namespace prefixes in the XML we generated. By default, JAXB creates simple prefixes like “ns1″, “ns2″ and so on. I’m not sure it matters unless you’re processing XML using some archaic means, but keeping partners happy is usually a good idea, so I turned to the JAXB API.

JAXB makes prefix customization pretty easy through the NamespacePrefixMapper class, found in the com.sun.xml.bind.marshaller package. The abstract class has one method to implement:

<br /> public abstract String getPreferredPrefix(<br /> String namespaceUri,<br /> String suggestion,<br /> boolean requirePrefix);<br />

From here, it’s a simple matter of returning the prefix you want for a given namespace, then telling your JAXBContext about your implementation:

<br /> Marshaller marshaller =<br /> jaxbContext.createMarshaller();<br /> marshaller.setProperty(”com.sun.xml.bind.namespacePrefixMapper”,<br /> new MyNamespacePrefixMapper());<br />

If you’re also using javax.xml.xpath.XPath, your NamespacePrefixMapper can also implement javax.xml.namespace.NamespaceContext, centralizing your namespace customization in a single class.

nick Entry java, jaxb, namespace customization, xml, xpath