Java Objects

This section briefly describes the mapping of struct instances to java classes.

The underlying philosophy is to provide an intuitive, typed mechanism to manipulate the data structures, and provide automated validation features.

For each struct, 3 java files are generated:

• {class}.java is the main class. {class} implements the IXMLStruct interface.

• {class}ArrayList.java is a collection of {class} that is used as the data type for glfields. {class}ArrayList implements the XMLStruct interface.

• {class}Meta.java contains the metadata, used to validate and automate the conversion from/to XML.

All files must be included in a project that uses {class}, except for {class}ArrayList that must be included only when collections are used. The project must have the org.xooof.xmlstruct package which provide helper functions to the generated code.

To each field of the struct corresponds a property of {class}.

For vfields, the variant datatype is exposed, so null values can be manipulated. Howver, the underlying datatype is fixed and an automatic coercion is done whenever a property is set (see the table below).

For gfields, the generate class is used as the datatype.

For vlfields, typed collections are used (see the table below).

For glfields, the generated collection class is used as the datatype.

Note The python script struct2java.py is used to produce java files from struct instances.