xsd:any deserialization in doc/literal mode

[Thomas Sandholm <sa...@mcs.anl.gov>]

Hi,

I'm looking into the tradeoffs of trying to deserialize an xsd:any to Java 
objects or just expose it as a DOM Element (like it's done in .NET).
The problem with deserializing the any is that it is very hard to make it 
roundtrip safe. When deserializing into Java objects some optimizations are 
inevitable done to simplify the programming model. One example is the Java 
Type vs XML element problem. XML elements are currently mapped to Java 
types wrapping the element type. Although the serialization framework 
relies on this wrapping to take place, the current deserialization 
framework has no means to easily rewrap these elements to the Java wrapper 
classes as far as I have been able to tell. So my current thinking is that 
it would probably make sense to be able to set a MessageContext property 
specifying whether deserialization of the any should be attempted (and thus 
risking to lose roundtrip capability). Does this make sense to you? Thoughts?
/Thomas


Thomas Sandholm <sa...@mcs.anl.gov>
The Globus Project(tm) <http://www.globus.org>
Ph: 630-252-1682, Fax: 630-252-1997
Argonne National Laboratory