[Axis2] Generated element objects vs. business objects

[vandenberget]

Hi,

I'm struggling a bit with the following.

Say, I have a web service that allows you to search for customers. It accepts a customer name, and returns a set (any number) of customers. The response xml may look like

<customerSearchResponse>
        <customer>
                <number>123</number>
                <name>John Doe</name>
        </customer>
        <customer>
                <number>987</number>
                <name>Jane Doe</name>        
        </customer>
</customerSearchResponse>

Obviously, in my application I have a Customer class. Now if I create a wsdl for this web service, and generate the server side code for it, one of the classes that is generated is a customer class, that represents the customer in the xml response. On the other hand, I have the Customer domain object, which is a different one. To generate the response, I have to create 'xml response' customers, and basically copy the information from the Customer class to it. The above example is very simple, but you can imagine more complexe cases that would involve a lot of copying from domain objects to xml representation objects. This is very tedious and error-prone work -- typically work that I would like to avoid.

Is there an elegant way to solve this issue?


Thanks,
Tom