Aliasing is a technique to customize the generated XML or to use a particular formatted XML using XStream. Let’s suppose the following XML format is to be used to serialize/de-serialize the Student object.

<student name = "Suresh">
   <note>
      <title>first</title>
      <description>My first assignment.</description>
   </note>
   
   <note>
      <title>second</title>
      <description>My second assignment.</description>
   </note>
</student>

Based on the above XML format, let’s create model classes.

class Student {
   private String studentName;
   private List<Note> notes = new ArrayList<Note>();
   
   public Student(String name) {
      this.studentName = name;
   }
   
   public void addNote(Note note) {
      notes.add(note);
   }
   
   public String getName() {
      return studentName;
   }
   
   public List<Note> getNotes() {
      return notes;
   }
}

class Note {
   private String title;
   private String description;

   public Note(String title, String description) {
      this.title = title;
      this.description = description;
   }

   public String getTitle() {
      return title;
   }

   public String getDescription() {
      return description;
   }     
}

Let’s test the above objects serialization using XStream.

Create a java class file named XStreamTester in C:\>XStream_WORKSPACE\com\tutorialspoint\xstream.

File: XStreamTester.java

package com.tutorialspoint.xstream;

import java.io.ByteArrayInputStream;
import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;

import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

import javax.xml.transform.OutputKeys;
import javax.xml.transform.Source;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.sax.SAXSource;
import javax.xml.transform.sax.SAXTransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;

import org.xml.sax.InputSource;

import com.thoughtworks.xstream.XStream;
import com.thoughtworks.xstream.io.xml.StaxDriver;

public class XStreamTester {
   public static void main(String args[]) {
   
      XStreamTester tester = new XStreamTester();
      XStream xstream = new XStream(new StaxDriver());
      Student student = tester.getStudentDetails();
      
      //Object to XML Conversion
      String xml = xstream.toXML(student);
      System.out.println(formatXml(xml));		
   }	

   private Student getStudentDetails() {
   
      Student student = new Student("Mahesh");
      
      student.addNote(new Note("first","My first assignment."));
      student.addNote(new Note("second","My Second assignment."));
      
      return student;
   }

   public static String formatXml(String xml) {
   
      try {
         Transformer serializer = SAXTransformerFactory.newInstance().newTransformer();
         
         serializer.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");
         serializer.setOutputProperty("{http://xml.apache.org/xslt}indent-amount", "2");
         
         Source xmlSource = new SAXSource(new InputSource(
            new ByteArrayInputStream(xml.getBytes())));
         StreamResult res =  new StreamResult(new ByteArrayOutputStream());            
         
         serializer.transform(xmlSource, res);
         
         return new String(((ByteArrayOutputStream)res.getOutputStream()).toByteArray());
         
      } catch(Exception e) {
         return xml;
      }
   }
}

class Student {
   private String studentName;
   private List<Note> notes = new ArrayList<Note>();
   
   public Student(String name) {
      this.studentName = name;
   }
   
   public void addNote(Note note) {
      notes.add(note);
   }
   
   public String getName() {
      return studentName;
   }
   
   public List<Note> getNotes() {
      return notes;
   }
}

class Note {
   private String title;
   private String description;
   
   public Note(String title, String description) {
      this.title = title;
      this.description = description;
   }
   
   public String getTitle() {
      return title;
   }
   
   public String getDescription() {
      return description;
   }     
}

Verify the Result

Compile the classes using javac compiler as follows −

C:\XStream_WORKSPACE\com\tutorialspoint\xstream>javac XStreamTester.java

Now run the XStreamTester to see the result −

C:\XStream_WORKSPACE\com\tutorialspoint\xstream>java XStreamTester

Verify the output as follows −

<?xml version = "1.0" encoding = "UTF-8"?>
<com.tutorialspoint.xstream.Student>
   <studentName>Mahesh</studentName>
   <notes>
      <com.tutorialspoint.xstream.Note>
         <title>first</title>
         <description>My first assignment.</description>
      </com.tutorialspoint.xstream.Note>
      
      <com.tutorialspoint.xstream.Note>
         <title>second</title>
         <description>My Second assignment.</description>
     </com.tutorialspoint.xstream.Note>
   </notes>
</com.tutorialspoint.xstream.Student>

In the above result, the Student object name is fully qualified. To replace it as student tag, follow the next section.

• Class Aliasing

• Field Aliasing

• Implicit Collections Aliasing

• Attribute Aliasing

• Package Aliasing

Table of Contents
1.xstream tutorial

2.xstream overview

3.xstream environment setup

4.xstream first application

5.xstream aliasing

6.xstream annotations

7.xstream converters

8.xstream object streams

9.xstream writing json using xstream

10.xstream quick guide

11.xstream useful resources

12.discuss xstream