XmlDeserializer

XmlDeserializer provides methods for transforming web service responses sent in XML into domain model entities. Like JsonDeserializer, an XmlDeserializer is registered with a RestfulSession for a particular entity class, and it requires two methods to be implemented: deserializeObject and deserializeObjects. These methods are responsible for interpreting XML object representations and building Java objects from them.

Example Use Case

Suppose a web service sends responses back as XML when requesting Foo models:

<foos>
    <foo>
        <id>328</id>
        <val>42</val>
    </foo>
    <foo>
        <id>329</id>
        <val>27</val>
    </foo>
</foos>

XmlDeserializer tells the framework how to interpret this response as a collection of Foo objects.

public class FooDeserializer extends XmlDeserializer<Foo> {

    @Override
    public Foo deserializeObject(String xml) {
        // XML parsing logic
    }

    @Override
    public List<Foo> deserializeObjects(String xml) {
        // XML parsing logic
    }

}

Registering an XmlDeserializer

The Session interface exposes a method registerDeserializer, which can register an XmlDeserializer for a given class. However, only the RestfulSession implementation makes use of deserializers.

restSession.registerDeserializer(Foo.class, new FooDeserializer());

Once an XmlDeserializer has been registered with a RestfulSession for a particular class, its serialization methods will be used to interpret responses from the web service. If no deserializer is registered for a class, the framework will attempt to convert responses to objects using the default Simple Framework implementation.