intertwingly

Gordon Weakliem: It seems to me that if you were generating proxy code for a WSDL contract and you hit <ANY> in a schema, the easiest thing to do would be to delegate to the programmer; i.e. give the programmer an XML Element and make her figure out what to do with it.  The next beta of Axis (and the current nightly builds) will map this:

<xsd:any processContents="lax" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>

into this:

private org.apache.axis.message.MessageElement [] _any;

Where MessageElement implements javax.xml.soap.SOAPElement from SAAJ and adds several methods, including a constructor that takes an org.w3c.dom.Element and a getAsDOM method which will return the DOM element.  There's actually plenty of other methods, so you don't need to go the DOM route, but it is there if you need it.