Custom deserialization

[Manuel Mall <MM...@arcus.com.au>]

I recently started using Axis to develop a client. I had no prior WSDL/SOAP
experience but just pointed the WSDL2Java tool the WSDL of the service I
needed to write the client for, wrote a bit of application logic, and it all
worked. All pretty simple and straight forward. My congratulations to the
Axis team.

The service I am using does something unusual (at least I think so). In many
of the calls the data returned is itself an XML document. So, let's say
there is a field/parameter/element called <response> defined as string
however the string value is another XML document (all nicely escaped in the
SOAP message like: &lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot;
encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;). I also have a XML Schema for these
documents. The question I have is if there is a way to deserialize those
fields as part of deserializing the SOAP message. What I am currently doing
is using JAXB to get this data into Java structures. So Axis deserializes
the SOAP response and puts the field containing the embedded XML into a
String which I then give to JAXB to deserialize further. This means I am
carrying two deserialization environments around, two different compilers
(JAXB and WSDL2Java), ... And I would like to reduce this to one
environment. I know under JAXB there are all sorts of custom hooks to put my
own functions in. Is there something similar in Axis/WSDL2Java so I can make
use of the Axis deserialization engine for these embedded XML documents?

Thanks

Manuel