XMLGregorianCalendar needs a getXmlSchemaType() method

[glassfishrobot]

Submitted by David Bau, entered initially by Joe Fialli

There should be a method to say "which one of the XML Schema Date
types does this correspond to"? based on the set fields, e.g., have an
enumeration for gYear, gMonth, gMonthYear, as well as no-type, and then have
a getXmlSchemaType() method. What's the use case? We have some customers
with schemas where they have unions of various XML Schema Date types, and it
is very useful to know which member of the union they have.

Environment

Operating System: All
Platform: All

Affected Versions

[2.0 draft]

[glassfishrobot]

Reported by @jfialli

[glassfishrobot]

@jfialli said:
JAXB 1.0 xml to java databinding made a significant effort to hide, rather than
expose,
the XML relationships of the java data structure. Rationale was to keep the
default bindings as minimal as possible and to avoid reintroducing the complexities
inherent in DOM manipulations.

Rather than address this issue at the granularity of this datatype, perhaps the
bigger issue is whether (and how) to allow a Java application to inquire about the
relationship of the Java representation to the XML info set w/o complicating the
API for those who do not desire this info.

Another issue with adding getXmlSchemaType() method to XMLGregorianCalendar, is
how does one find out the xml schema type that the builtin Java datatypes
map to ? Given that there are 46 xml schema builtin datatypes, there is a many
xml schema datatypes to one Java datatype circumstance for more than just
XMLGregorianCalendar. For example, many XMLSchema datatypes are bound to the
default of java.lang.String. How does one find out what xml schema type an
Java int or java.lang.Integer maps to ?

The reason that JAXB 1.0 bound to existing Java datatypes was that it was felt
that Java programmers feel more comfortable with these types than types
made up by JAXB that instances of the types would preserve their
xml schema relationships.

[glassfishrobot]

This issue was imported from java.net JIRA JSR222-6