[java] Jackson - How to process (deserialize) nested JSON?

{
  vendors: [
    {
      vendor: {
        id: 367,
        name: "Kuhn-Pollich",
        company_id: 1,
      }
    },
    {
      vendor: {
        id: 374,
        name: "Sawayn-Hermann",
        company_id: 1,
      }
  }]
}

I have a Vendor object that can properly be deserialized from a single "vendor" json, but I want to deserialize this into a Vendor[], I just can't figure out how to make Jackson cooperate. Any tips?

This question is related to java json serialization jackson

The answer is


Your data is problematic in that you have inner wrapper objects in your array. Presumably your Vendor object is designed to handle id, name, company_id, but each of those multiple objects are also wrapped in an object with a single property vendor.

I'm assuming that you're using the Jackson Data Binding model.

If so then there are two things to consider:

The first is using a special Jackson config property. Jackson - since 1.9 I believe, this may not be available if you're using an old version of Jackson - provides UNWRAP_ROOT_VALUE. It's designed for cases where your results are wrapped in a top-level single-property object that you want to discard.

So, play around with:

objectMapper.configure(SerializationConfig.Feature.UNWRAP_ROOT_VALUE, true);

The second is using wrapper objects. Even after discarding the outer wrapper object you still have the problem of your Vendor objects being wrapped in a single-property object. Use a wrapper to get around this:

class VendorWrapper
{
    Vendor vendor;

    // gettors, settors for vendor if you need them
}

Similarly, instead of using UNWRAP_ROOT_VALUES, you could also define a wrapper class to handle the outer object. Assuming that you have correct Vendor, VendorWrapper object, you can define:

class VendorsWrapper
{
    List<VendorWrapper> vendors = new ArrayList<VendorWrapper>();

    // gettors, settors for vendors if you need them
}

// in your deserialization code:
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
JsonNode rootNode = mapper.readValue(jsonInput, VendorsWrapper.class); 

The object tree for VendorsWrapper is analogous to your JSON:

VendorsWrapper:
    vendors:
    [
        VendorWrapper
            vendor: Vendor,
        VendorWrapper:
            vendor: Vendor,
        ...
    ]

Finally, you might use the Jackson Tree Model to parse this into JsonNodes, discarding the outer node, and for each JsonNode in the ArrayNode, calling:

mapper.readValue(node.get("vendor").getTextValue(), Vendor.class);

That might result in less code, but it seems no less clumsy than using two wrappers.


I'm quite late to the party, but one approach is to use a static inner class to unwrap values:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonCreator;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonProperty;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonProcessingException;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;

class Scratch {
    private final String aString;
    private final String bString;
    private final String cString;
    private final static String jsonString;

    static {
        jsonString = "{\n" +
                "  \"wrap\" : {\n" +
                "    \"A\": \"foo\",\n" +
                "    \"B\": \"bar\",\n" +
                "    \"C\": \"baz\"\n" +
                "  }\n" +
                "}";
    }

    @JsonCreator
    Scratch(@JsonProperty("A") String aString,
            @JsonProperty("B") String bString,
            @JsonProperty("C") String cString) {
        this.aString = aString;
        this.bString = bString;
        this.cString = cString;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "Scratch{" +
                "aString='" + aString + '\'' +
                ", bString='" + bString + '\'' +
                ", cString='" + cString + '\'' +
                '}';
    }

    public static class JsonDeserializer {
        private final Scratch scratch;

        @JsonCreator
        public JsonDeserializer(@JsonProperty("wrap") Scratch scratch) {
            this.scratch = scratch;
        }

        public Scratch getScratch() {
            return scratch;
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws JsonProcessingException {
        ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
        Scratch scratch = objectMapper.readValue(jsonString, Scratch.JsonDeserializer.class).getScratch();
        System.out.println(scratch.toString());
    }
}

However, it's probably easier to use objectMapper.configure(SerializationConfig.Feature.UNWRAP_ROOT_VALUE, true); in conjunction with @JsonRootName("aName"), as pointed out by pb2q


Here is a rough but more declarative solution. I haven't been able to get it down to a single annotation, but this seems to work well. Also not sure about performance on large data sets.

Given this JSON:

{
    "list": [
        {
            "wrapper": {
                "name": "Jack"
            }
        },
        {
            "wrapper": {
                "name": "Jane"
            }
        }
    ]
}

And these model objects:

public class RootObject {
    @JsonProperty("list")
    @JsonDeserialize(contentUsing = SkipWrapperObjectDeserializer.class)
    @SkipWrapperObject("wrapper")
    public InnerObject[] innerObjects;
}

and

public class InnerObject {
    @JsonProperty("name")
    public String name;
}

Where the Jackson voodoo is implemented like:

@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
@JacksonAnnotation
public @interface SkipWrapperObject {
    String value();
}

and

public class SkipWrapperObjectDeserializer extends JsonDeserializer<Object> implements
        ContextualDeserializer {
    private Class<?> wrappedType;
    private String wrapperKey;

    public JsonDeserializer<?> createContextual(DeserializationContext ctxt,
            BeanProperty property) throws JsonMappingException {
        SkipWrapperObject skipWrapperObject = property
                .getAnnotation(SkipWrapperObject.class);
        wrapperKey = skipWrapperObject.value();
        JavaType collectionType = property.getType();
        JavaType collectedType = collectionType.containedType(0);
        wrappedType = collectedType.getRawClass();
        return this;
    }

    @Override
    public Object deserialize(JsonParser parser, DeserializationContext ctxt)
            throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        ObjectNode objectNode = mapper.readTree(parser);
        JsonNode wrapped = objectNode.get(wrapperKey);
        Object mapped = mapIntoObject(wrapped);
        return mapped;
    }

    private Object mapIntoObject(JsonNode node) throws IOException,
            JsonProcessingException {
        JsonParser parser = node.traverse();
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        return mapper.readValue(parser, wrappedType);
    }
}

Hope this is useful to someone!


@Patrick I would improve your solution a bit

@Override
public Object deserialize(JsonParser jp, DeserializationContext ctxt)
        throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {        
    ObjectNode objectNode = jp.readValueAsTree();
    JsonNode wrapped = objectNode.get(wrapperKey);
    JsonParser parser = node.traverse();
    parser.setCodec(jp.getCodec());
    Vendor mapped = parser.readValueAs(Vendor.class);
    return mapped;
}

It works faster :)


Examples related to java

Under what circumstances can I call findViewById with an Options Menu / Action Bar item? How much should a function trust another function How to implement a simple scenario the OO way Two constructors How do I get some variable from another class in Java? this in equals method How to split a string in two and store it in a field How to do perspective fixing? String index out of range: 4 My eclipse won't open, i download the bundle pack it keeps saying error log

Examples related to json

Use NSInteger as array index Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected end of JSON input at JSON.parse (<anonymous>) HTTP POST with Json on Body - Flutter/Dart Importing json file in TypeScript json.decoder.JSONDecodeError: Extra data: line 2 column 1 (char 190) Angular 5 Service to read local .json file How to import JSON File into a TypeScript file? Use Async/Await with Axios in React.js Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token u in JSON at position 0 how to remove json object key and value.?

Examples related to serialization

laravel Unable to prepare route ... for serialization. Uses Closure TypeError: Object of type 'bytes' is not JSON serializable Best way to save a trained model in PyTorch? Convert Dictionary to JSON in Swift Java: JSON -> Protobuf & back conversion Understanding passport serialize deserialize How to generate serial version UID in Intellij Parcelable encountered IOException writing serializable object getactivity() Task not serializable: java.io.NotSerializableException when calling function outside closure only on classes not objects Cannot deserialize the JSON array (e.g. [1,2,3]) into type ' ' because type requires JSON object (e.g. {"name":"value"}) to deserialize correctly

Examples related to jackson

No Creators, like default construct, exist): cannot deserialize from Object value (no delegate- or property-based Creator JSON parse error: Can not construct instance of java.time.LocalDate: no String-argument constructor/factory method to deserialize from String value How to convert JSON string into List of Java object? Deserialize Java 8 LocalDateTime with JacksonMapper java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: No converter found for return value of type java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonInclude$Value How to modify JsonNode in Java? Deserialize JSON with Jackson into Polymorphic Types - A Complete Example is giving me a compile error Convert Map to JSON using Jackson Required request body content is missing: org.springframework.web.method.HandlerMethod$HandlerMethodParameter