JAXB unmarshalling of “generic” real world documents

Question

We have a large set of configuration documents of the style

  
    ...more content
  
  

        

Answer 1

If the structure really is that simple I'd be tempted to parse the top two levels (foo and the class attribute of bar) myself using an XMLStreamReader, then hand the reader off to the JAXB unmarshaller to parse each bar, assembling the results into a list. I wouldn't bother trying to parse the outer envelope layers using JAXB directly.