Binding nested complex objects with KSOAP2 Android

Question

I'm trying to bind a XML response from a WS to a set of POJO's classes using ksoap2-android.
A lot of examples on the internet treat very simple responses like this one.
In my case however, I have a lot of custom classes and they keep a reference of each other, sometimes even inside an arraylist.

Here's what i'm trying to do, i would like to bind this kind of response :

<Car number="35">
    <Engine>
        [...]
    </Engine>
    <Passenger id="1">
        [...]
    </Passenger>
    <Passenger id="2">
        [...]
    </Passenger>
</Car>

To this kind of class :

public class Car {

    private int number;
    private Engine engine;
    private ArrayList<Passenger> passengers;

}

With, if possible, only modifying POJOs files (the Simple XML annotations system is very elegant, too bad there's no equivalent to this in ksoap).

I looked into the KVMSerializable interface, but when I try to override the getPropertyInfo() method, I have no idea of what I should return in the PropertyInfo.type and how will ksoap handle ArrayLists.

I got a huge headache right now, please help me

Answer 1

You should read the document from ksoap 2, they have many useful examples in there.
For getting an array of complex type, you can check here
And I have used this approach to parse a complex object.
If all of them not work, you have to map field by field from soap object to your pojo.
Updated:

Thanks a lot for the 3rd link, it's very useful and I'm now able to map custom objects. However, in the wiki page you provided, the author is parsing an array of custom classes, wrapped in a parent element. Is there a way to do this with inline lists like in my example ?

I have never tried it before, but I think you can combine my answer and the wiki. First, you can try an example from wiki to implement your passengers list (extends Vector). Then you can use my approach to create a complex object with arraylist inside. The important thing is you must register your object with the response from web service. Something like this:

 public class PassengerVector extends Vector<Passenger> implements KvmSerializable {    

 }

 envelope.addMapping(NAMESPACE, "Car", Car.class);
 envelope.addMapping(NAMESPACE, "Passenger", PassengerVector.class);

But I'm not sure this way can work. For a very complex object like your example, I recommend you should get data field by field by its name, as like the wiki