Jackson - How to process (deserialize) nested JSON?

Question

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


        

Answer 1

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 vendors = new ArrayList();

    // 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.