Marshalling LocalDate using JAXB : <p>I'm building a series of linked classes whose instances I want to be able to marshall to XML so I can save them to a file and read them in again later.</p>

<p>At present I'm using the following code as a test case:</p>

<pre><code>import javax.xml.bind.annotation.*;

import javax.xml.bind.JAXBContext;
import javax.xml.bind.JAXBException;
import javax.xml.bind.Marshaller;

import java.time.LocalDate;

public class LocalDateExample
{
  @XmlRootElement
  private static class WrapperTest {
    public LocalDate startDate;
  }

  public static void main(String[] args) throws JAXBException
  {
    WrapperTest wt = new WrapperTest();
    LocalDate ld = LocalDate.of(2016, 3, 1);
    wt.startDate = ld;
    marshall(wt);
  }

  public static void marshall(Object jaxbObject) throws JAXBException
  {
    JAXBContext context = JAXBContext.newInstance(jaxbObject.getClass());
    Marshaller marshaller = context.createMarshaller();
    marshaller.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, Boolean.TRUE);
    marshaller.marshal(jaxbObject, System.out);
  }
}
</code></pre>

<p>The XML output is:</p>

<pre><code>&lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?&gt;
&lt;wrapperTest&gt;
    &lt;startDate/&gt;
&lt;/wrapperTest&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>Is there a reason why the <code>startDate</code> element is empty? I would like it to contain the string representation of the date (i.e. <code>toString()</code>). Do I need to write some code of my own in order to do this?</p>

<p>The output of <code>java -version</code> is:</p>

<pre><code>openjdk version "1.8.0_66-internal"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_66-internal-b17)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.66-b17, mixed mode)
</code></pre>
