Ignore a parent class when Serializing to XML

Question

Is there a JAXB annotation to ignore a parent class, when you have an @XmlElement on a List of the child classes?

Just to clarify - I was wondering if there was a be

Answer 1

How about?

The Parent Class

We will use XmlAccessType.NONE to tell JAXB that only explicitly annotated fields/properties are mapped.

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType;

@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.NONE)
public class Parent {

    private String parentProperty1;
    private String parentProperty2;

    public String getParentProperty1() {
        return parentProperty1;
    }

    public void setParentProperty1(String parentProperty1) {
        this.parentProperty1 = parentProperty1;
    }

    public String getParentProperty2() {
        return parentProperty2;
    }

    public void setParentProperty2(String parentProperty2) {
        this.parentProperty2 = parentProperty2;
    }

}

The Child Class

We will use XmlAccessType.PROPERTY on the child. Any properties from the parent class we want to include will need to be overridden and be explicitly annotated. In this example we will bring in parentProperty2 from the Parent class. You will only need to override the getter from the parent class.

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlAccessorType;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;

@XmlRootElement
@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.PROPERTY)
public class Child extends Parent {

    private String childProperty;

    @Override
    @XmlElement
    public String getParentProperty2() {
        return super.getParentProperty2();
    }

    public String getChildProperty() {
        return childProperty;
    }

    public void setChildProperty(String childProperty) {
        this.childProperty = childProperty;
    }

}

Demo Class

import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext;
import javax.xml.bind.Marshaller;

public class Demo {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        JAXBContext jc = JAXBContext.newInstance(Child.class);

        Child child = new Child();
        child.setParentProperty1("parentProperty1");
        child.setParentProperty2("parentProperty2");
        child.setChildProperty("childProperty");

        Marshaller marshaller = jc.createMarshaller();
        marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
        marshaller.marshal(child, System.out);
    }
}

Output

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<child>
    <childProperty>childProperty</childProperty>
    <parentProperty2>parentProperty2</parentProperty2>
</child>