Gson: Is there an easier way to serialize a map

Question

This link from the Gson project seems to indicate that I would have to do something like the following for serializing a typed Map to JSON:

    public static         


        

Answer 1

Default

The default Gson implementation of Map serialization uses toString() on the key:

Gson gson = new GsonBuilder()
        .setPrettyPrinting().create();
Map original = new HashMap<>();
original.put(new Point(1, 2), "a");
original.put(new Point(3, 4), "b");
System.out.println(gson.toJson(original));

Will give:

{
  "java.awt.Point[x\u003d1,y\u003d2]": "a",
  "java.awt.Point[x\u003d3,y\u003d4]": "b"
}

---

Using enableComplexMapKeySerialization

If you want the Map Key to be serialized according to default Gson rules you can use enableComplexMapKeySerialization. This will return an array of arrays of key-value pairs:

Gson gson = new GsonBuilder().enableComplexMapKeySerialization()
        .setPrettyPrinting().create();
Map original = new HashMap<>();
original.put(new Point(1, 2), "a");
original.put(new Point(3, 4), "b");
System.out.println(gson.toJson(original));

Will return:

[
  [
    {
      "x": 1,
      "y": 2
    },
    "a"
  ],
  [
    {
      "x": 3,
      "y": 4
    },
    "b"
  ]
]

More details can be found here.