How to exclude a property of a nested multi-occurance element.

I have two classes: A and B. A has a property items which is a collection of B, when mapping I would like to exclude the id property of A and of all B items. How can I achieve it? The closest thing I found in the user guide is the names{fullName} example when working with nested multi-occurrence elements (nothing on exclusion though) - so I tried to do something similar to exclude the id of B but it results in the exclusion of the entire items property (needless to say that A’s id gets excluded properly).

@Entity
public class A {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;
    //...

    @OneToMany()
    @JoinColumn(name = "a_id")
    private Set<B> items;

    // getters and setters
}

@Entity
public class B {

    @Id
    @GeneratedValue
    private Long id;
    //...

    public B() {}

    // getters and setters
}

MapperFactory mapperFactory = new DefaultMapperFactory.Builder().build();
        mapperFactory.classMap(A.class, A.class)
                .mapNulls(true)
                .exclude("id")
                .exclude("items{id}")
                .byDefault()
                .register();

MapperFacade mapperFacade = mapperFactory.getMapperFacade();
A dest = mapperFacade.map(source, A.class);

[medvednic]

I’ve successfully achieved my goal using your suggestion to create a custom class map builder, it is much more convenient than my attempted workaround. I will post Gist later this week.

[elaatifi]

So basically you want to exclude id everywhere ? to do that you need to create a custom class map builder with a custom byDefault method.

https://gist.github.com/elaatifi/5212119

here is an example of how to create custom class map builders, for instance this one is supporting annotations, but you can provide your own rules : exclude id fields or any other generic rule.