Serialexable

Serialex supports a number of field classes. However there may be times when objects with other field classes need to be converted to XML.

Serialex includes a Serialexable interface that defines two methods:

and

If Serialex finds a Serialexable object, it will delegate the marshalling of the object to the object's marshal() implementation. The intent of this method is to prduce a String that describes the object sufficiently so that it can subsequently be unmarshalled by the corresponding unmarshal() implementation.

Here is an example of a Serialexable class. It demonstrates how to marshal and unmarshal a single URL field.

import net.sf.serialex.Serialexable;
import net.sf.serialex.unmarshal.UnmarshalException;
import net.sf.serialex.marshal.MarshalException;

import java.net.URL;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;

public class SerialexableClass implements Serialexable {

  private URL url;

  public URL getUrl() {
    return url;
  }

  public void setUrl(URL url) {
    this.url = url;
  }

  public String marshal() throws MarshalException {
    if (url == null) {
      throw new MarshalException("Problem marshalling, e);
    }
    return url.getProtocol() + '|' + url.getHost() + '|' + url.getFile();
  }

  public void unmarshal(String str) throws UnmarshalException {
    String[] strings = str.split("\\|");
    try {
      url = new URL(strings[0], strings[1], strings[2]);
    } catch (MalformedURLException e) {
      throw new UnmarshalException("Problem unmarshalling, e);
    }
  }
}


If Serialexable.marshal() returns null, the coresponding unmarshal() will not be performed, leaving the field uninitialized.