CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaxmljaxb
Alex A
Alex A

Reputation: 567

JAXB skip invalid elements and continue processing

I have an application that needs to process XML files in the following format:

<records>
    <record/>
    <record/>
    <record/>
    ...
</records>

I am using JAXB to parse these files. However I am trying to prepare my application for the inevitable occurrence for when it is unable to parse one of the records due to some invalid data (for example a character where an int should be).

The problem is that if JAXB is unable to parse an individual record, it halts processing on the entire file. This is not good - I need it to only skip the problematic record, report it, and move on. However I can't discover any way to do this. The only thing I've found is the ValidationEventHandler which lets me return true telling JAXB to continue processing the file in the event of an error, but the problem with that is that it doesn't actually SKIP the problematic record - it tries to parse it even though it's known to be invalid, which causes NumberFormatException and halts processing.

I found this answer How to skip a single jaxb element validation contained in a jaxb collection in Spring Batch Job? but it doesn't actually answer the question, just suggests to use ValidationEventHandler even though that functionality is not sufficient.

How can I skip the invalid records and continue processing? How can I solve this problem?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 265

Answers (1)

Jonathan S. Fisher
Jonathan S. Fisher

Reputation: 8837

Typically I wouldn't use JAXB if I knew that the input data will likely contain errors and I need to gracefully recover... STAX might be better suited. But, Jaxb does have a "catch all" you can use: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/javax/xml/bind/annotation/XmlAnyElement.html

Upvotes: 1

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