Thursday 18 April 2013

Spring MVC, Jackson and Filtering JSON Serialization



The default Spring JSON configuration will show all the fields of an object during serialization. Often we would like to return a subset of an entity’s properties and hide some which are only used internally such as the id and version.  Or perhaps return different properties depending on who/what is requesting the data.

As Spring uses Jackson for JSON serialization it supports the Jackson Json annotations. Jackson provides a number of options for “narrowing” or “filtering” the properties of an entity that gets serialized.

Jackson JsonViews (requires adding @JsonView to entity classes which pollutes them)
Jackson mix-in (requires extending the entity to specify @JsonIgnoreProperties)

Jackson Filtering options

Example of using Jackson views and mixin for filtering:

This one creates a new annotation to use with JsonViews but is a little too involved for my liking as it requires changing some Spring classes.

This link provides a good demo of Jackson Views and Mixins

Within my SearchController I was returning a SearchSummary object that referenced a Collector object. However, I didn’t want to return all the Collector details within the SearchSummary as its not relevant. Shown below is all I required:

@RequestMapping("/rest/loyalty")
@Controller
public class SearchController {

    @JsonIgnoreProperties({"loyaltyId","earnings","id","version"})
    private static class CollectorIdOnlyView extends Collector {
        // Empty by design ...
    } 
      
    private final ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper();

    private final MappingJacksonJsonView view = new MappingJacksonJsonView();      
    
    public SearchController() {         
        objectMapper.getSerializationConfig().addMixInAnnotations(Collector.class, CollectorIdOnlyView.class);
        view.setObjectMapper(objectMapper);
          
    }
    @Autowired
    private AccountService accountService;
      
    @Autowired
    private SearchService searchService;
      
    @RequestMapping(value = "/search/{id}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public View getSummary(@PathVariable("id") String id, Model uiModel) {
        Collector collector = accountService.findCollectorById(id);
        if(collector == null) {
              throw new RuntimeException("Collector Not Found");
        } else {
              SearchSummary searchSummary = searchService.getSearchSummary(collector);
              uiModel.addAttribute("summary",searchSummary);
              return view;
        }
       
    }
}

For the filtering I had to create a subclass of my entity to define the properties I wanted to ignore. (CustomerIdOnlyView).
This is then used to configure the ObjectMapper and View.
The change I had to make to the getSummary method was to change the return type from SearchSummary to View, add the SearchSummary to the Model and remove the @ResponseBody annotation.

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