Deserializing non-string map keys with Jackson

Question

I have a a map that looks like this:

public class VerbResult {
    @JsonProperty(\"similarVerbs\")
    private Map> similarVerbs         


        

Answer 1

As mentioned above the trick is that you need a key deserializer (this caught me out as well). In my case a non-String map key was configured on my class but it wasn't in the JSON I was parsing so an extremely simple solution worked for me (simply returning null in the key deserializer).

public class ExampleClassKeyDeserializer extends KeyDeserializer
{
    @Override
    public Object deserializeKey( final String key,
                                  final DeserializationContext ctxt )
       throws IOException, JsonProcessingException
    {
        return null;
    }
}

public class ExampleJacksonModule extends SimpleModule
{
    public ExampleJacksonModule()
    {
        addKeyDeserializer(
            ExampleClass.class,
            new ExampleClassKeyDeserializer() );
    }
}

final ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
mapper.registerModule( new ExampleJacksonModule() );