Different Behavior of annotation @XmlMixed in JDK 1.6

This annotation got introduced in JDK 1.5 for a multi-valued property of Java Bean. i.e. if the property is supposed to contain combination of following, then it will use this annotation.

-          Text that can be added to java.lang.String
-          Child objects/JAXBElements
-          Unknown content that won’t get bound to a JAXB class (along with @XmlAnyElement)

While using this annotation with JDK 1.6, I noticed a strange behavior. Here are the details –
Input xml is having following structure

<message>
<MyObj>
…..
…..
</MyObj>
</message>

When we unmarshall this xml using JAXB bundled with JDK 1.5, it returns MyObj object only. But when I migrated to JDK 1.6, it behaved strange. Instead of returning only one object, it returned three –

1^st value – “\n”
2^nd value – Myobj
3^rd value – “\n”

It resulted in in ClassCastException, because it returned String instead of Object at same location. When I removed end of line character from input message, i.e. the message looked like below, it worked fine.

<message><MyObj>
…..
…..
</MyObj></message>

Another way to fix it is to migrate to JDK 1.6.0_24. It seems to be fixed in this minor release.