When using Spring MVC for REST, how do you enable Jackson to pretty-print rendered JSON?

Question

While developing REST services using Spring MVC, I would like render JSON \'pretty printed\' in development but normal (reduced whitespace) in production.

Answer 1

Might I suggest this approach, it is valid with Spring 4.0.x and possibly older versions.

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializationFeature;
import java.util.List;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.http.converter.HttpMessageConverter;
import org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.EnableWebMvc;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurerAdapter;

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc    
public class WebMvcConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {


    @Bean
    public MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter() {
        MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter = new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter();
        mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter.setObjectMapper(objectMapper());
        return mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter;
    }

    @Bean
    public ObjectMapper objectMapper() {
        ObjectMapper objMapper = new ObjectMapper();
        objMapper.enable(SerializationFeature.INDENT_OUTPUT);
        return objMapper;
    }

    @Override
    public void configureMessageConverters(List> converters) {
        super.configureMessageConverters(converters);        
        converters.add(mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter());
    }

}

Thanks to Willie Wheeler for the solution: Willie Wheeler's Spring blog