Gson - deserialization to specific object type based on field value

Question

I want to deserialize json objects to specific types of objects (using Gson library) based on type field value, eg.:

[
    {
          \"type\":         


        

Answer 1

If you have a lot of sub types and you do not want to or cannot maintain a list of them, you can also use an annotation based approach.

Here is the required code and also some usage examples: https://gist.github.com/LostMekka/d90ade1fe051732d6b4ac60deea4f9c2 (it is Kotlin, but can easily be ported to Java)

For me, this approach is especially appealing, since I write a small library that does not know all possible sub types at compile time.