Exception in thread “main” javax.xml.bind.PropertyException: name: eclipselink.media-type value: application/json

Question

I'm attempting to follow the example located here but get an javax.xml.bind.PropertyException. I receive this exception because of the following line of code:

marshaller.setProperty(MarshallerProperties.MEDIA_TYPE, "application/json");

I have literally copy/pasted the example listed above so my code is exactly what you see there. Searching SO and Google for this has not been helpful, and thought I'd bring this to the geniuses at SO for some help. Any help would be most appreciated, (de)serialization with JSON and XML with json.org, Jackson, and JAXB has turned into a black and bottomless pit that has consumed almost a month of my life.

My first impression was that I wasn't properly specifying the eclipselink runtime (as described here) but that didn't produce a solution.

Stacktrace:

Exception in thread "main" javax.xml.bind.PropertyException: name: eclipselink.media-type value: application/json
   at javax.xml.bind.helpers.AbstractMarshallerImpl.setProperty(AbstractMarshallerImpl.java:358)
   at com.sun.xml.internal.bind.v2.runtime.MarshallerImpl.setProperty(MarshallerImpl.java:527)
   at HelloWorld.main(HelloWorld.java:17)

This is what I'm doing,

Answer 1

You need to have the EclipseLink jars (2.4.0 or newer) on your class path, and a jaxb.properties file in the same package as the classes used to bootstrap theJAXBContext with the following entry:

javax.xml.bind.context.factory=org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContextFactory

Below is a link to an example on GitHub that you can run to see everything working:

• https://github.com/bdoughan/blog20110819

Answer 2

To my main method I added (you could also use -D):

System.setProperty("javax.xml.bind.context.factory","org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContextFactory");

Answer 3

If you don't want to add a jaxb.properties file, you can do this all in Java code. This is especially helpful for legacy systems where you don't want to risk affecting the classpath by introducing a new jaxb.properties file.

import org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContextFactory;
import org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.JAXBContextProperties;
import org.eclipse.persistence.jaxb.xmlmodel.ObjectFactory;

//Set the various properties you want
Map<String, Object> properties = new HashMap<>();
properties.put(JAXBContextProperties.MEDIA_TYPE, "application/json");
properties.put(JAXBContextProperties.JSON_INCLUDE_ROOT, false);

//Create a Context using the properties
JAXBContext jaxbContext = 
    JAXBContextFactory.createContext(new Class[]  {
       MyClass.class,    ObjectFactory.class}, properties);
Marshaller jaxbMarshaller = jaxbContext.createMarshaller();

//Marshall the object
StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
jaxbMarshaller.marshal(myObject, stringWriter);
String json = stringWriter.toString();