Mapping comments?

[dimitris]

Wouldn't it make sense to be able to map also the comments from an xml file to a POJO model, as well? (and the reverse)

From a deployment point of view, this would allow reading, modifiying and writing back an existing descriptor (e.g. xxx-service.xml) without destroying completely it's content (alhtough its formating for sure).

[starksm64]

Without javadoc annotations (which are scheduled for java6), I don't see how this can be done in general as we have no requirement for source code creation. I don't see that the current jaxb2.0 spec (Early Draft 2
Tuesday, March 15, 2005) has any annotation for this purpose either. Perhaps that is something that could be suggested via an email to [e-mail]

[aloubyansky]

I think, Dimitris meant to bind comments from XML content to, e.g., Java fields, not to Java comments.

[dimitris]

Yes, just a simple mapping of xml comments to fields. If this could be optionally mapped to annotations, thats fine.

[starksm64]

I guess I don't understand the difference between mapping to a java field and a java comment. Are you saying there should be treatment of comments as text to map onto an object the same as a text element?

The problem is how is there a meaningful indexing of the comments to the java objects?

[aloubyansky]

"Scott" wrote:
Are you saying there should be treatment of comments as text to map onto an object the same as a text element?

Yes.

"Scott" wrote:
The problem is how is there a meaningful indexing of the comments to the java objects?

I don't know any rule for that. But there are use-cases, e.g. if there is no element 'description' the text could appear in comments instead and be bound to a field 'description' in a class.

[dimitris]

I was thinking of a simple binding that would let you get/set the comments before the beggining of an element (and after the end of the previous element).

 ...
 </prev-element>

 <!-- comment1 -->
 <!-- comment2 -->
 <element1>
 ...
 </element1>

public class PojoForElement1
{
 String[] getComments()
 void setComments(String[])
 ...
}