[java] Could not read JSON: Can not deserialize instance of hello.Country[] out of START_OBJECT token

I have rest url that gives me all countries - http://api.geonames.org/countryInfoJSON?username=volodiaL.

I use RestTemplate from spring 3 to parse returned json into java objects:

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
Country[] countries = restTemplate.getForObject("http://api.geonames.org/countryInfoJSON?username=volodiaL",Country[].class);

When I run this code I get an exception:

Caused by: com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException: Can not deserialize instance of hello.Country[] out of START_OBJECT token
 at [Source: sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection$HttpInputStream@1846149; line: 1, column: 1]
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException.from(JsonMappingException.java:164)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.DeserializationContext.mappingException(DeserializationContext.java:691)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.DeserializationContext.mappingException(DeserializationContext.java:685)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.std.ObjectArrayDeserializer.handleNonArray(ObjectArrayDeserializer.java:222)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.std.ObjectArrayDeserializer.deserialize(ObjectArrayDeserializer.java:133)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.std.ObjectArrayDeserializer.deserialize(ObjectArrayDeserializer.java:18)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper._readMapAndClose(ObjectMapper.java:2993)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper.readValue(ObjectMapper.java:2158)
    at org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter.readJavaType(MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter.java:225)
    ... 7 more

Finally my Country class:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonIgnoreProperties;

@JsonIgnoreProperties(ignoreUnknown = true)
public class Country {
    private String countryName;
    private long geonameId;

    public String getCountryName() {
        return countryName;
    }

    public long getGeonameId() {
        return geonameId;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return countryName;
    }
}

The problem is that returned json contains root element "geonames" which contains array of country elements like so:

{
"geonames": [
    {
        "continent": "EU",
        "capital": "Andorra la Vella",
        "languages": "ca",
        "geonameId": 3041565,
        "south": 42.42849259876837,
        "isoAlpha3": "AND",
        "north": 42.65604389629997,
        "fipsCode": "AN",
        "population": "84000",
        "east": 1.7865427778319827,
        "isoNumeric": "020",
        "areaInSqKm": "468.0",
        "countryCode": "AD",
        "west": 1.4071867141112762,
        "countryName": "Andorra",
        "continentName": "Europe",
        "currencyCode": "EUR"
    }
]
}

How to tell RestTemplate to convert each element of array into Country object?

If you want to avoid using an extra Class and List<Object> genomes you could simply use a Map.

The data structure translates into Map<String, List<Country>>

String resourceEndpoint = "http://api.geonames.org/countryInfoJSON?username=volodiaL";

Map<String, List<Country>> geonames = restTemplate.getForObject(resourceEndpoint, Map.class);

List<Country> countries = geonames.get("geonames");

For Spring-boot 1.3.3 the method exchange() for List is working as in the related answer

Spring Data Rest - _links

Another solution:

public class CountryInfoResponse {
  private List<Object> geonames;
}

Usage of a generic Object-List solved my problem, as there were other Datatypes like Boolean too.

In my case, I was getting value of <input type="text"> with JQuery and I did it like this:

var newUserInfo = { "lastName": inputLastName[0].value, "userName": inputUsername[0].value,
 "firstName": inputFirstName[0] , "email": inputEmail[0].value}

And I was constantly getting this exception

com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException: Can not deserialize instance of java.lang.String out of START_OBJECT token at [Source: java.io.PushbackInputStream@39cb6c98; line: 1, column: 54] (through reference chain: com.springboot.domain.User["firstName"]).

And I banged my head for like an hour until I realised that I forgot to write .value after this"firstName": inputFirstName[0].

So, the correct solution was:

var newUserInfo = { "lastName": inputLastName[0].value, "userName": inputUsername[0].value,
 "firstName": inputFirstName[0].value , "email": inputEmail[0].value}

I came here because I had this problem and I hope I save someone else hours of misery.

Cheers :)