JAXB: Marshalling/Unmarshalling Example

This post shows how you can marshal a JAXB object into XML and unmarshal XML into a JAXB object.

Consider the following JAXB class:

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*;

@XmlRootElement
public class Book {

  @XmlElement
  private String author;

  @XmlElement
  private String title;
}

Unmarshalling:
To convert an XML string into an object of class Book:

public static Book unmarshal(final String xml) throws JAXBException {
  return (Book) JAXBContext.newInstance(Book.class)
                           .createUnmarshaller()
                           .unmarshal(new StringReader(xml));
}

Marshalling:
To convert a Book object into an XML string:

public static String marshal(Book book) throws JAXBException {
  final Marshaller m = JAXBContext.newInstance(Book.class)
                                  .createMarshaller();
  m.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, true);
  final StringWriter w = new StringWriter();
  m.marshal(book, w);
  return w.toString();
}