Avoid Jackson serialization on non fetched lazy objects

Question

I have a simple controller that return a User object, this user have a attribute coordinates that have the hibernate property FetchType.LAZY.

When I try to get this

Answer 1

I tried @rick's useful answer, but ran into the problem that "well-known modules" such as jackson-datatype-jsr310 weren't automatically registered despite them being on the classpath. (This blog post explains the auto-registration.)

Expanding on @rick's answer, here's a variation using Spring's Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder to create the ObjectMapper. This auto-registers the "well-known modules" and sets certain features in addition to installing the Hibernate4Module.

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
public class MyWebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

    // get a configured Hibernate4Module
    // here as an example with a disabled USE_TRANSIENT_ANNOTATION feature
    private Hibernate4Module hibernate4Module() {
        return new Hibernate4Module().disable(Hibernate4Module.Feature.USE_TRANSIENT_ANNOTATION);
    }

    // create the ObjectMapper with Spring's Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder
    // and passing the hibernate4Module to modulesToInstall()
    private MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter jacksonMessageConverter(){
        Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder builder = new Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder()
                            .modulesToInstall(hibernate4Module());
        return new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter(builder.build());
  }

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