How to instantiate an empty element with JAXB

Question

I use JAXB to create XML messages. The XML I need to create is (for the sake of simplicity):

Answer 1

An empty tag for a String object is essentially the empty string.

If you call the following, you will get what you are looking for:

request.setHeader("")

I should also note that in XML the following two declarations of a header are idential. Both of these have no child text nodes. These are essentially the same and will be treated the same by all XML parsers: