XStream several node types in signle collection

Question

I'm trying to deserialize such XML document:

<rootelem>
    <elementType1 arg1="..." />
    <elementType1 arg1="..." />
    <elementType1 arg1="..." />
    <elementType2 argA="..." argB="..." />
    <elementType2 argA="..." argB="..." />
    <elementType2 argA="..." argB="..." />
</rootelem>

By default XStream can parse only such form:

<rootelem>
    <list1>
        <elementType1 arg1="..." />
        <elementType1 arg1="..." />
        <elementType1 arg1="..." />
    </list1>

    <list2>
        <elementType2 argA="..." argB="..." />
        <elementType2 argA="..." argB="..." />
        <elementType2 argA="..." argB="..." />
    </list>
</rootelem>

This is because XStream use next format for collections:

<collection>
    <elem .... />
    <elem .... />
    <elem .... />
</collection>

and frame tags are obligatory. Collection can contain only single type nodes. So how can I parse such XML document? Now I've written my own convertor for this but I wonder are there some other ways?

Answer 1

I think that Implicit Collections is the solution for you.

http://x-stream.github.io/alias-tutorial.html#implicit

Here is the sample code:

package com.thoughtworks.xstream;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) {

            Blog teamBlog = new Blog(new Author("Guilherme Silveira"));
            teamBlog.add(new Entry("first","My first blog entry."));
            teamBlog.add(new Entry("tutorial",
                    "Today we have developed a nice alias tutorial. Tell your friends! NOW!"));

            XStream xstream = new XStream();
            xstream.alias("blog", Blog.class);
            xstream.alias("entry", Entry.class);

            xstream.addImplicitCollection(Blog.class, "entries");

            System.out.println(xstream.toXML(teamBlog));
    }
}

And the result:

<blog>
  <author>
     <name>Guilherme Silveira</name>
  </author>
  <entry>
     <title>first</title>
     <description>My first blog entry.</description>
  </entry>
  <entry>
     <title>tutorial</title>
     <description>
          Today we have developed a nice alias tutorial. Tell your friends! NOW!
     </description>
  </entry>
</blog>