Five Minute Tutorial

Added by Robin Shen, edited by Robin Shen on Feb 10, 2010
You are viewing an old version (v. 2) of this page.
The latest version is v. 25, last edited on Feb 18, 2010 (view differences | )
<< View previous version | view page history | view next version >>

We demonstrate usage of this tool with a simple tutorial. Assume a Task class below with a prioritized field indicating whether it is a prioritized task:

package example;

public class Task {
  public boolean prioritized;
}

With XStream, we can serialize object of this class to XML like below:

Task task = new Task();
task.setPrioritized(true);
String xml = new XStream().toXML(task);
saveXmlToFileOrDatabase(xml);

Resulting XML will be:

<example.Task>
  <prioritized>true</prioritized>
</example.Task>

And you can deserialize the XML to get back task object:

String xml = readXmlFromFileOrDatabase();
Task task = (Task)(new XStream(new DomDriver()).fromXML(xml));

Everything is fine. Now we find a prioritized flag is not enough for a task, we need to enhance it to take a numeric priority field ranges from 1 to 10, so the task class becomes:

package example;

public class Task {
  public int priority;
}

However deserialization of previously saved xml is no longer possible since the new Task class is no longer compatible.

Enter labels to add to this page:
Please wait 
Looking for a label? Just start typing.