I know, and I thought of that.
Unfortunately, I need to expose 296 service classes, containing 5000 references to List, and I have a program that is creating web service wrappers for all the classes (the original classes combined data and access logic, which had to split in half to work in the web service world. The program I wrote can be applied to any arbitrary class, though, uses reflection, and I am planning on cleaning it up and offering it). Programmatically, I can't determine the data type of a List, so I have to replace with Object[], which isn't much better (although AXIS WSDL code seems to like that)
You cant add xdoclet metadata to state the type of lists? I really miss typed datastructures, its the main bit of C++ that I still miss, even if its templating was awful compared to that of the polymorphic type inference features of Standard ML.
I guess porting to the generics compiler is out too, huh :) That's OK, axis cant handle that iether.
It seems to me that if Axis handles Object[] then it should be able to serialize List, at the very least by going List.toArray() & returning the object array. typing would be a nice extra, with a configurable in the WSDD declarations that stated the java class in the list.
You sound like you are doing a major undertaking there. I wish you well -you could probably derive an interesting paper or two from the experience.
I'll point you at my making web-services-that-work paper http://www.iseran.com/Steve/papers/wstw/
which may be of interest
-steve
