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

We can extend BeanSerializer, but with little trick.

First, define a java class to wrapper your POJO.

@JsonSerialize(using = MixinResultSerializer.class)
public class MixinResult {

    private final Object origin;
    private final Map mixed = Maps.newHashMap();

    @JsonCreator
    public MixinResult(@JsonProperty("origin") Object origin) {
        this.origin = origin;
    }

    public void add(String key, String value) {
        this.mixed.put(key, value);
    }

    public Map getMixed() {
        return mixed;
    }

    public Object getOrigin() {
        return origin;
    }

}

Then，implement your custom serializer.

public final class MixinResultSerializer extends BeanSerializer {

    public MixinResultSerializer() {
        super(SimpleType.construct(MixinResult.class), null, new BeanPropertyWriter[0], new BeanPropertyWriter[0]);
    }

    public MixinResultSerializer(BeanSerializerBase base) {
        super(base);
    }

    @Override
    protected void serializeFields(Object bean, JsonGenerator gen, SerializerProvider provider) throws IOException {
        if (bean instanceof MixinResult) {
            MixinResult mixin  = (MixinResult) bean;
            Object      origin = mixin.getOrigin();

            BeanSerializer serializer = (BeanSerializer) provider.findValueSerializer(SimpleType.construct(origin.getClass()));

            new MixinResultSerializer(serializer).serializeFields(origin, gen, provider);

            mixin.getMixed().entrySet()
                    .stream()
                    .filter(entry -> entry.getValue() != null)
                    .forEach((entry -> {
                        try {
                            gen.writeFieldName(entry.getKey());
                            gen.writeRawValue(entry.getValue());
                        } catch (IOException e) {
                            throw new RuntimeException(e);
                        }
                    }));
        } else {
            super.serializeFields(bean, gen, provider);
        }

    }

}

This way, we can handle the case that origin object using jackson annotations to custom serialize behavior.