Ninja provides out of the box support to render arbitrary Java objects as XML as well as parsing of XML into Java objects.
Consider this simple model class:
package models;
public class Person {
String name;
}
And this controller:
package controllers;
public class ApplicationController {
public Result index() {
Person person = new Person();
person.name = "John Johnson";
return Results.xml().render(person);
}
}
This controller will produce a nicely formatted XML output:
<Person><name>John Johnson</name></Person>
If you want to parse incoming XML requests you simply have to add the mapping POJO to the controller method signature.
Consider the following XML:
<Person><name>John Johnson</name></Person>
This Xml maps to the following Java pojo:
package models;
public class Person {
String name;
}
If you send that XML to your application via the HTTP body you only need to add POJO class to the controller method and Ninja will pase the incoming XML for you:
package controllers;
public class ApplicationController {
public Result parsePerson(Person person) {
String nameOfPerson = person.name; // will be John Johnson
...
}
}
Under the hood Ninja uses Jackson (http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonHome). Jackson is one of the most widely used XML serializers of the Java ecosystem.
If you want to customize the way Jackson works you can do so by injecting XmlMapper into a startup action and modifying it.
@Singleton
public class MyXmlMapper {
@Inject
XmlMapper xmlMapper;
@Start(order = 90)
public void configureXmlMapper() {
// Adding Joda Time parsing and rendering support to Jackson
xmlMapper.registerModule(new JodaModule());
}
}
XmlMapper is a singleton and can be modified and extended by your application.
It is safe to modify XmlMapper before it is actually used, but it is not threadsafe to modify XmlMapper after is has been used to parse or generate XML.
More on Jackson modules: http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonFeatureModules