Add a Marshaller decorator
Here's an example. Let's say we want to have an annotation that will trigger pretty-printing, nice formatting, of an XML document. If we were doing raw JAXB, we would set a property on the Marshaller of Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT. Let's write a Marshaller decorator. First we define a annotation: import org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.Decorator; @Target({ElementType.TYPE, ElementType.METHOD, ElementType.PARAMETER, ElementType.FIELD}) @Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME) @Decorator(processor = PrettyProcessor.class, target = Marshaller.class) public @interface Pretty {} To get this to work, we must annotate our @Pretty annotation with a meta-annotation called @Decorator. The target() attribute must be the JAXB Marshaller class. The processor() attribute is a class we will write next. import org.jboss.resteasy.core.interception.DecoratorProcessor; import org.jboss.resteasy.annotations.DecorateTypes; import javax.xml.bind.Marshaller; import javax.xml.bind.PropertyException; import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType; import javax.ws.rs.Produces; import java.lang.annotation.Annotation; /** * @author Bill Burke * @version $Revision: 1 $ */ @DecorateTypes({"text/*+xml", "application/*+xml"}) public class PrettyProcessor implements DecoratorProcessor { public Marshaller decorate(Marshaller target, Pretty annotation, Class type, Annotation[] annotations, MediaType mediaType) { target.setProperty(Marshaller.JAXB_FORMATTED_OUTPUT, Boolean.TRUE); } } The processor implementation must implement the DecoratorProcessor interface and should also be annotated with @DecorateTypes. This annotation specifies what media types the processor can be used with. Now that we've defined our annotation and our Processor, we can use it on our JAX-RS resource methods or JAXB types as follows: @GET @Pretty @Produces("application/xml") public SomeJAXBObject get() {...} If you are confused, check the Resteasy source code for the implementation of @XmlHeader