Help required in building up the Java Bean for an XML data

Question

Hi ,
I want to build a Java bean which will actually represent an xml data . The class will be named as User and it will typically represent the data in the follwing xml:
<user>
<cwsId>barbete</cwsId>
<firstName>William</firstName>
<lastName>Barber</lastName>
<status>true</status>
<role>
<roleCode>1000000177</roleCode>
<roleName>Customer Administrator</roleName>
</role>
<language>en</language>
<country>US</country>
<preferences>
<equipmentGroup>2717</equipmentGroup>
<dateFormat>MON-dd-yyyy</dateFormat>
<timeFormat>HH:MI AM</timeFormat>
<timeZone>-12:00</timeZone>
<daylightSavings>Y</daylightSavings>
<location>NC</location>
<recordsPerPage>10</recordsPerPage>
<historyPeriod>3</historyPeriod>
<distanceUnit>MILE</distanceUnit>
<fuelUnit>G</fuelUnit>
<unitIdDisplay>E</unitIdDisplay>
<smuUpdate>W</smuUpdate>
<countries>
<country>
<countryCode>GB</countryCode>
<countryName>UNITED KINGDOM</countryName>
</country>
<country>
<countryCode>US</countryCode>
<countryName>UNITED STATES</countryName>
</country></countries>
</preferences>
</user>
Now for single child nodes like cwsId of the main user node i have kept properties like
private String cwsId;
But i am not sure as to how to represent the nodes which contain subnodes like "preferences"node. Any ideas?What is the standard practice?

Answer 1

One thing you could do is create an object model first, which will contain all the data for your user.
then all you need in the bean is a Hashtable with the name of the user as a key, and the user-object (which is actually the complete object model) as a value.
with the XML stated by you, you would get an object model something like this:
Class User
    String cwsid;
    String firstName;
    ArrayList<Role> roles = new ArrayList<Role>(); //I'm assuming a user can have more then one role.
    ArrayList<Country> countries = new ArrayList<Country>();
class Role {
    String code;
    String name;
class Country {
    String code;
    String name;
}And so on for all the varioous elemets of your XML.