eclipselink moxy xpath - selecting all child elements of the current node or all elements in a document with a particular name - xpath

Question

i have this xpath defined for moxy in a jaxb class
#XmlPath("child::*/REG")
public List entries;
but it won't unmarshal the xml document correctly. the List variable called entries is empty.
i've also tried
#XmlPath("*/REG")
public List entries;
i've also tried
#XmlPath("//REG")
public List entries;
without joy
but if i do
#XmlPath("BANKGIRO/REG")
public List entries;
it's fine and the list is populated.
I haven't looked through the source yet but I'm guessing this type of xpath is not supported yet. I checked all my xpath in an xpath verifier for sanity and all the xpath above is fine (all the xpath is valid for the context node i'm positioned at).

Answer 1

EclipseLink JAXB (MOXy) does currently not support an XPath like: #XmlPath("child::*/REG"). Our focus has been on supporting XPath statements that provide enough information for marshalling as well as unmarshalling. For example it is clear what #XmlPath("child::*/REG") means on a read, but is ambiguous in terms when writing that object back to XML or JSON. If you are interested in this kind of support please enter an enhancement request:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/enter_bug.cgi?product=EclipseLink
MOXy does support XPath like:
#XmlPath(".") // Map to self node, useful when mapping two objects to same element
#XmlPath("#foo") // Map to attribute
#XmlPath("foo") // Map to element
#XmlPath("foo[2]") // Map to 2nd occurence of
#XmlPath("foo[#bar='Hello World']") // Map to foo element with bar attribute with value "Hello World"
#XmlPath("ns1:foo/ns2:#bar") // Map to namespace qualified nodes
For More Information
http://blog.bdoughan.com/2010/07/xpath-based-mapping.html
http://blog.bdoughan.com/2010/09/xpath-based-mapping-geocode-example.html
http://blog.bdoughan.com/2011/03/map-to-element-based-on-attribute-value.html