Those pesky @XmlRootElement annotations

[joshuajborn]

Hello, everyone,

First, thank you for the docx4j library.

I'm using the library to generate Word documents based on data retrieved from an application's database, and the library is streamlining the process quite a bit.

One nuisance I've encountered is in creating tables. It seems a couple of the table-related nodes don't have the @XmlRootElement annotation and so generate an error when trying to save the document (and implicitly marshal the XML).

I saw that someone else in another thread (link below) ran into an issue with the missing @XmlRootElement annotations. In that case, there was a workaround since the marshaling was being done explicitly. However, in my case, the marshaling is being done when the WordprocessingMLPackage.save() call gets down to that particular element.

I realize that these classes org.docx4j.wml.* are generated automatically, and I am downloading the source so that I can add in the annotations and rebuild the library. Is there any quicker way to handle this case? It is a bit tedious to rebuild the library from source every time I encounter a new one of these.

Missing @XmlRootElement annotations; deepCopy (cloning) thread: http://dev.plutext.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=206&start=0&hilit=annotation&sid=6a2cd4245f7348a3d340c669d02da4f0

[jason]

Hi Joshua

I don't have a general solution for you right now, but I am interested in looking into the particular case. Which table-related element isn't marshalling?

For anybody else who happens across this topic, as Joshua notes, there are workarounds if you are marshalling explicitly. See the Getting Started Guide, under Tips and Tricks > @XmlRootElement

cheers .. Jason

[joshuajborn]

So far I am encountering this with the TblPr and the TblGrid elements. See below.

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com.sun.istack.internal.SAXException2: unable to marshal type "org.docx4j.wml.TblPr" as an element because it is missing an @XmlRootElement annotation


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com.sun.istack.internal.SAXException2: unable to marshal type "org.docx4j.wml.TblGrid" as an element because it is missing an @XmlRootElement annotation


[joshuajborn]

Also, org.docx4j.wml.TblBorders seems to have the same problem.

[jason]

Had a quick look at this.

TblPr already has the annotation:

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@XmlRootElement(name = "tblPr")
public class TblPr


so unless you are using code which predates that, it is odd that you'd get an error.

TblGrid doesn't have the annotation, but:

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      TblGrid tblGrid = Context.getWmlObjectFactory().createTblGrid();
      tbl.setTblGrid(tblGrid);

is marshalled ok in CreateWordprocessingMLDocument
(see TblFactory).

How are you creating your tblGrid?

cheers .. Jason

[joshuajborn]

I noticed that, too, but didn't investigate further since I was distracted by my efforts to get the build from source to work.

Looking back, I found the issue was that I had a

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tbl.getEGContentRowContent().add(tblPr);

instead of a

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tbl.setTblPr(tblPr);

in my code. I don't have the code in front of me, but I'm guessing the tblGrid had a similar problem.

Oh, well, I guess the annotation wasn't the issue.

Lesson learned: when writing a lot of code for JAXB generated classes, pay attention to when to use the

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.getFoo.add(bar)

syntax and when to use the

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.setFoobar(foobar)

syntax.