Jackson: How to add custom property to the JSON without modifying the POJO

Question

I am developing a REST interface for my app using Jackson to serialize my POJO domain objects to JSON representation. I want to customize the serialization for some types to

Answer 1

Since (I think) Jackson 1.7 you can do this with a BeanSerializerModifier and extending BeanSerializerBase. I've tested the example below with Jackson 2.0.4.

import java.io.IOException;

import org.junit.Test;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonGenerationException;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonGenerator;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.BeanDescription;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonSerializer;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationConfig;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializerProvider;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.module.SimpleModule;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ser.BeanSerializerModifier;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ser.impl.ObjectIdWriter;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ser.std.BeanSerializerBase;


public class JacksonSerializeWithExtraField {

    @Test
    public void testAddExtraField() throws Exception
    {
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

        mapper.registerModule(new SimpleModule() {

            public void setupModule(SetupContext context) {
                super.setupModule(context);

                context.addBeanSerializerModifier(new BeanSerializerModifier() {

                    public JsonSerializer modifySerializer(
                            SerializationConfig config,
                            BeanDescription beanDesc,
                            JsonSerializer serializer) {
                        if (serializer instanceof BeanSerializerBase) { 
                              return new ExtraFieldSerializer(
                                   (BeanSerializerBase) serializer);
                        } 
                        return serializer; 

                    }                   
                });
            }           
        });

        mapper.writeValue(System.out, new MyClass());       
        //prints {"classField":"classFieldValue","extraField":"extraFieldValue"}
    }


    class MyClass {

        private String classField = "classFieldValue";

        public String getClassField() { 
            return classField; 
        }
        public void setClassField(String classField) { 
            this.classField = classField; 
        }
    }


    class ExtraFieldSerializer extends BeanSerializerBase {

        ExtraFieldSerializer(BeanSerializerBase source) {
            super(source);
        }

        ExtraFieldSerializer(ExtraFieldSerializer source, 
                ObjectIdWriter objectIdWriter) {
            super(source, objectIdWriter);
        }

        ExtraFieldSerializer(ExtraFieldSerializer source, 
                String[] toIgnore) {
            super(source, toIgnore);
        }

        protected BeanSerializerBase withObjectIdWriter(
                ObjectIdWriter objectIdWriter) {
            return new ExtraFieldSerializer(this, objectIdWriter);
        }

        protected BeanSerializerBase withIgnorals(String[] toIgnore) {
            return new ExtraFieldSerializer(this, toIgnore);
        }

        public void serialize(Object bean, JsonGenerator jgen,
                SerializerProvider provider) throws IOException,
                JsonGenerationException {           
            jgen.writeStartObject();                        
            serializeFields(bean, jgen, provider);
            jgen.writeStringField("extraField", "extraFieldValue"); 
            jgen.writeEndObject();
        }
    }
}