I need a suggestion - Object to XML, XML to object

Question

Hi everyone,
I've made a tool that stores objects into an XML document. It's a serialization process, I guess. It works well, but I have a problem, that may be impossible to solve:
When I restore an object from the XML document, I need to instantiate new objects all the time. Consider this:
This class:
public class ScreenConfiguration
    private int width = 1024;
    private int height = 768;
    private int resolution = 96;
    private int colorDepth = 32;
}would become
<object class="ScreenConfiguration" version="1a">
<width>1024</width>
<height>768</height>
<resolution>96</resolution>
<colorDepth>32</colorDepth>
</object>
So far, so good, right? The problem is when I want to restore an object.
If the ScreenConfiguration class would have this constructor:
ScreenConfiguration(int width, int height, int resolution, int colorDepth)I would not be able to instantiate the class without passing the correct parameters. And it's impossible to determine the correct parameters. Is there any way you can instantiate a class without letting it run any initializing code? I'm guessing that this problem is impossible to overcome, but there's no harm in asking... Any suggestions?
Thanks on advance,
Nille

Answer 1

I was a bit unclear while describing the problem. The example provided is very very very simple. The problem isn't these kinds of classes, but more complex classes, such as Hashtables and Vectors that that contains fields that requires parameters while being instantiated. I don't really care about the initialization process - once I have an object I can restore it's fields and it won't know it's been restored from an XML file.
To clearify the problem, consider this class:
public class ATestClass
   Integer myTestField = new Integer(15);
}Serializing this class is no problem: the Integer object simply contains a value-field that can be serialized without any problem. When restoring the object I want to create an integer and set its 'value' field, but since there is no default constructor, this is not prossible. You are not obligated to provide a default constructor in java, but is there anyway to use one even though it's not there? It seems far-fetched, but I'm trying anything right know...