How do I marshall a list using javax.xml.bind.annotation?

Question

Hopefully this is so simple a cave man could do it.
I had to remove the Duke Stars for the time being. I found another bug in the program that may have resulted in my array being empty.
I'm trying to marshall a standalone document of my DeckImpl class. It is a deck of cards of course. It contains an array of CardImpl objects that need to be marshalled too. I could not figure out how to marhall the array so I have a marshall(Marshaller m) method that will
initialize the List (see below) with an ArrayList. I figured the marshaller would do the rest but I just get the declaration and a closed <DECK />tag with the correct attributes (see way below) when I comment out the @XmlElementWrapper, or a DECK root node that simply contains a closed <CARDS /> tag with the line enabled. You can see tha CardImpl class is annotated too.
I must be missing something obvious. Please help.
@XmlRootElement(name = "DECK")
@XmlType(name = "DECK")
public class DeckImpl implements Comparable<DeckImpl> {
    @XmlAttribute
    public int id;
    @XmlAttribute
    public boolean isShuffled;
    @XmlAttribute
    public boolean isCut;
    public CardImpl[] cards;
    @XmlElementWrapper(name="CARDS")
    @XmlElements(@XmlElement(name="CARD",type=CardImpl.class))
    public List<CardImpl> CARDS;
    private static JAXBContext context;
    private static Marshaller marshaller;
public DeckImpl(int id, boolean isCut, boolean isShuffled,
            CardImpl[] cards) {
        this.id = id;
        this.isShuffled = isShuffled;
        this.isCut = isCut;
        this.cards = cards;
        try {
            context = JAXBContext.newInstance(DeckImpl.class);
            marshaller = context.createMarshaller();
        } catch (JAXBException ex) {
            Logger.getLogger(CardImpl.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
//... class code goes here
/** Generates XML representation of a deck
     * @param writer
     * @throws javax.xml.bind.JAXBException
    public void marshall(Writer writer) throws JAXBException {
        CARDS = new ArrayList<CardImpl>(cards.length);
        for (CardImpl i : cards) {
            CARDS.add(i);
        marshaller.marshal(this, writer);
@XmlType(name = "CARD")
public class CardImpl implements Comparable<CardImpl> {
    @XmlElement(name = "NAME")
    public String name;
    @XmlElement(name = "SUIT")
    public String suit;
    @XmlAttribute
    public int value;
    @XmlAttribute
    public int pointValue;
//... class code
}The output is:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><DECK isCut="false" isShuffled="true" id="1"/>Regards,
Bill
Edited by: bthayer on Jan 24, 2009 7:15 AM
Edited by: bthayer on Jan 25, 2009 7:02 AM

Answer 1

There's a bit in here on marshalling.
http://java.sun.com/webservices/docs/1.4/tutorial/doc/index.html
Problem with JAXB (and I could be wrong - try posting on the Web Services / XML forum) is that you can only marshal the generated classes. This may mean that you need to create the object, and populate it using the setter / getter methods.
Castor is much more friendly for this as it can marshall objects using reflections. You may also want to look into XMLBeans (which I have no exp of)