Primitives

Overview

This section covers the XML representation of WOX primitive types, which include: byte, short, int, long, float, double, char, and boolean. For a complete list of the data types supported by WOX see the Data types mapping section.

We will show you how primitives are serialized with WOX. The code is provided in Java and C#.

The Product class

This is a simple example of a Product class, which has five fields: name of type string, price of type double, grams of type int, registered of type boolean, and category of type char.

//Java
public class Product {
    private String name;
    private double price;
    private int grams;
    private boolean registered;
    private char category;
    //constructors and methods omitted
}

//C#
public class Product {
    private String name;
    private double price;
    private int grams;
    private bool registered;
    private char category;
    //constructors and methods omitted
}

Serializing a Product object to XML

A Product object is created below.

//Java
Product p = new Product("Corn Flakes", 3.98, 500, true, 'A');

//C#
Product p = new Product("Corn Flakes", 3.98, 500, true, 'A');

We now use WOX to serialize the product object to XML. We need to specify the file name where the product object will be stored. The save method of the Easy class allows you to serialize an object to XML and store it to the specified XML file.

In Java you will require woxSerializer.jar and jdom.jar files in the classpath. In C# you will require woxSerializer.dll.

//Java
String filename = "product.xml";
Easy.save(product, filename);

//C#
String filename = "product.xml";
Easy.save(product, filename);

The XML representation of the product object after it is serialized with WOX is below. Note that both, the Java object and the C# object, have the same XML representation.

<object type="Product" id="0">
    <field name="name" type="string" value="Corn Flakes" />
    <field name="price" type="double" value="3.98" />
    <field name="grams" type="int" value="500" />
    <field name="registered" type="boolean" value="true" />
    <field name="category" type="char" value="\u0041" />
</object>          

You can see how simple the XML is. The root is an object element, with type attribute equals Product, which is the class of the object. The id attribute is used to handle object references (in this case we only have one object - the product object). Every field in the product object is represented by field elements, which have name (it is the name of the field in the class), type (it is the WOX data type of the field), and value attributes. Primitive types are represented in WOX as field elemets.

Note the category field of type char. It is represented as a the Unicode value \u0041, which corresponds to the character A.

De-serializing a Product object back from XML

Given that the XML that WOX generates when serializing a Java or C# object is the same, we can use the load method of the Easy class (either in Java or C#) to de-seralize the product object back from XML either to Java or C#. WOX in Java does not require the Product class to have default constructor; but WOX in C# does.

//Java
Product newProduct = (Product)Easy.load(filename);

//C#
Product newProduct = (Product)Easy.load(filename);

Done! The Product object has been reconstructed from XML to your chosen programming language.