Maintaining index for Arrays with null values

[sreekantan, vijay]

I am getting differing behavior between serialization and deserialization with axis.

Here is the scenario,

I am using the following structure to represent an ArrayOfBoolean values. Please notice the nillable="true", so the
elements can be null.
 
 
  <xsd:complexType name="ArrayOfBoolean">
    <xsd:complexContent>
        <xsd:sequence>
          <xsd:element
            name="a"
            type="xsd:boolean"
            minOccurs="0"
            maxOccurs="unbounded"
            nillable="true"
          />
        </xsd:sequence>
    </xsd:complexContent>
  </xsd:complexType>    
 
Now here is the SOAP data that gets gets serialized for a{null,true,null,true}.
    
     <a xsi:nil="true"/>
     <a>true</a>
     <a xsi:nil="true"/>
     <a>true</a>

This is done by the Axis BeanSerializer.
 
 
I am serializing / deserializing this to a boolean array using axis.
  
During deserialization, I am thinking I should get back a boolean array of size 4, with elements 0 and 2 null and 1 and
4 false.

Now because of this fastpath nil check returning null in BeanDeserializer, my indexing gets lost.

  // Fastpath nil checks...
  if (context.isNil(attributes))
    return null;

I get an array of size 2 with both elements true.
    
    
I think this should not be the case. I feel if serialization writes out xsi:nil="true" for a null element,
deserialization should also set back the value as null, so as to maintain indexing.

 

I looked at Axis 1.2, same code. I am getting the latest build to see if anything has changed.

Your views on this is greatly appreciated.

If anyone feels this is appropriate for the axis-dev list, do let me know too.

Regards
Vijay

 

 

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