Xstream does not maintain order of child elements while unmarshalling

Question

How maintain the order of unmarshalled child objects in a Set. Below is my xml, when converting to java objects order that I get in set is not A,B,C. How can I achieve that?

<company id="abc">
  <emp name="A"/>
  <emp name="B"/>
  <emp name="C"/>
</company>

Edit: Observations:

1. In my Company.class I had defined Set<Employee> and when xstream unmarshall it, it create the set as HashMap, so the order is not maintained. Ques) How can I use LinkedHashMap in xstream to maintain the order?

2. Then I defined the employee set as LinkedHashSet<Employee>. Doing this xstream create set as LinkedHashMap and order is maintained but Hibernate throws exception because there I have defined Set <set name="employees"> and it throws error on casting Set to LinkedHashSet

public void setEmployees(Set<Employee> emps){
  this.packages = (LinkedHashSet<Employee>)emps;
}

Answer 1

I solved the problem using my custom Converter but I guess there has to be a better way that to used custom converter for such a small problem. I'll keep looking but until then.

Add this

xstream.registerConverter(new CompanyConverter());

public Object unmarshal(HierarchicalStreamReader reader,UnmarshallingContext context) {

        Company comp = new Company();


        Set<Employee> packages = new LinkedHashSet<Employee>();

        while(reader.hasMoreChildren()){
            reader.moveDown();
            if("emp".equals(reader.getNodeName())){
                Employee emp = (Employee)context.convertAnother(comp, Employee.class);
                employees.add(emp);
            }
            reader.moveUp();
        }
        comp.setEmployees(employees);
        return comp;
    }