How can I set a description and an example in Swagger with Swagger annotations?

I have similar issue with generating examples for body objects - annotation @Example and @ExampleProperty simply doesn't work for no reason in swagger 1.5.x. (I use 1.5.16)

My current solution is:
use @ApiParam(example="...") for non-body objects, e.g.:

public void post(@PathParam("userId") @ApiParam(value = "userId", example = "4100003") Integer userId) {}

for body objects create new class and annotate fields with @ApiModelProperty(value = " ", example = " "), e.g.:

@ApiModel(subTypes = {BalanceUpdate.class, UserMessage.class})
class PushRequest {
    @ApiModelProperty(value = "status", example = "push")
    private final String status;;
}

Actually the java doc for the example property of the @ApiParam annotation states that this is exclusively to be used for non-body parameters. Where the examples property may be used for body parameters.

I tested this annotation

@ApiParam(
  value = "A JSON value representing a transaction. An example of the expected schema can be found down here. The fields marked with an * means that they are required.",
  examples = @Example(value = 
    @ExampleProperty(
      mediaType = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON,
      value = "{foo: whatever, bar: whatever2}"
    )
  )
)

which resulted in the following swagger to be generated for the corresponding method:

/transaction:
  post:
  ...
    parameters:
    ...
    - in: "body"
      name: "body"
      description: "A JSON value representing a transaction. An example of the expected\
        \ schema can be found down here. The fields marked with an * means that\
        \ they are required."
      required: false
      schema:
        type: "string"  
      x-examples:
        application/json: "{foo: whatever, bar: whatever2}"

However this value doesn't seem to be picked up by swagger-ui. I tried version 2.2.10 and the latest 3.17.4, but neither version used the x-examples property of the swagger.

There are some references for x-example (the one used for non-body parameters) in the code of swagger-ui but no match for x-examples. That is this doesn't seem to be supported by swagger-ui at the moment.

If you really need this example values to be present, your best option currently seems to be to change your method's signature and use a dedicated domain type for the body parameter. As stated in the comments already swagger will automatically pick up the structure of the domain type and print some nice information in swagger-ui: