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The Java code generated by the JAXB schema compiler contains annotations providing metadata on packages, classes, fields and methods. Together, this metadata is intended to reflect the information contained in an XML schema, of which only a very small part can be expressed by the actual Java code.
Annotations can be easily retrieved from their target construct with
methods contained in classes such as java.lang.Class or
java.lang.reflect.Field. Each annotation type has its
own set of attributes, which are accessed in the usual way. Given some
class, an annotation of type XmlType can be retrieved with
Class clazz = ...; XmlType typeAnn = clazz.getAnnotation( XmlType.class );If the result of the annotation getter is not null, annotation element values may be obtained by calling methods on the returned
XmlType object. To retrieve the name of the corresponding
XML Schema type you would write
String schemaName = typeAnn.name();
Classes that can be used for marshalling and unmarshalling XML need not be generated by the JAXB schema compiler. It is equally possible to write these classes by hand, adding the JAXB annotations. We'll discuss some basic annotations in the next section.
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