I am parsing JSON string from a byte-array and casting it as an object.
How do I determine the class of the object?
Object objDeserialized = gson.fromJson(jsonFromString, Object.class);
//It could be type Message or RoomDetail
gson.fromJson(jsonFromString, Object.class);
In general, this won't work because of Object.class. Gson prohibits overriding the Object class deserialization and uses ObjectTypeAdapter (see the primary Gson constructor as of Gson 2.8.0 and probably much earlier):
// built-in type adapters that cannot be overridden
factories.add(TypeAdapters.JSON_ELEMENT_FACTORY);
factories.add(ObjectTypeAdapter.FACTORY);
// the excluder must precede all adapters that handle user-defined types
factories.add(excluder);
// user's type adapters
factories.addAll(typeAdapterFactories);
If you want to use Object.class, you have to cast the result to either a primitive wrapper, null, or a List<E> or Map<K,V> -- and make some sort of analysis yourself. The rationale behind it is that you must know the result class in advance to make sure you're getting a proper deserialized object.
The best thing you can do here is making your custom parent super-type (does not really matter if it's a class or an interface), say class Message extends Base and class RoomDetail extends Base, and then registering a JsonDeserializer<Base> implementation to a GsonBuilder which can attempt to detect the real type of the Base instance. After that you can do:
gson.fromJson(jsonSource, Base.class);
See more:
Polymorphic objects deserialization:
How to parse dynamic json in android with retrofit 2 using annotations
How do I parse a nested JSON array of object with a custom Gson deserializer?
Json response parser for Array or Object
Google Gson extras, never been published as artifacts, but may be an inspiration point for you:
https://github.com/google/gson/blob/master/extras/src/main/java/com/google/gson/typeadapters/RuntimeTypeAdapterFactory.java
If you do not know the type of the JSON you want to parse you could use the JsonParser from the Gson lib to parse the JSON instead of the Gson class directly. e.g.
JsonParser parser = new JsonParser(jsonFromString);
JsonObject obj = parser.parse().getAsJsonObject();
You could then look at the properties of the JsonObject you have created to see what it is. e.g.
if (obj.has("somePropertyNameIKnownIsAMemberOfRoomDetail")) {
RoomDetail roomDetail = gson.fromJson(jsonFromString, RoomDetail.class);
} else {
Message message = gson.fromJson(jsonFromString, Message.class);
}
Related
Is there some way for a Jackson Delegate-based creator to access the raw Json String?
#JsonCreator
private static MyClass createFromJson(Map<String, Object> jsonProperties) {
return new MyClass(rawJson);
}
I am able to get the raw input as a Map of Strings to Objects in the code above, but I want to be able to access the json as a string. I tried the code below (based off of http://www.cowtowncoder.com/blog/archives/2011/07/entry_457.html) but that code as written is never invoked.
#JsonCreator
private static MyClass createFromJson(String rawJson) {
return new MyClass(rawJson);
}
Note: This is a spring boot application (1.3.1.RELEASE) that uses Jackson 2.6.4.
Looks like this type of functionality would not make sense in this context. In fact, it appears to me now that requesting the JSON string in this instance defeats the purpose of using jackson in the first place. However if anyone finds themselves here, then the comments from Sotirios Delimanolis may be useful:
"Hack: you can receive a JsonNode as the parameter type and use its toString method to get the corresponding JSON."
"It looks like you want a JsonDeserializer"
I have a json string, here is example
{
"Param1":"Value1",
"Param2":{...}
"ParamThatINeed":{...}
}
I want to get only "ParamThatINeed" object using gson lib in java, what is the best way to get what I need - write root class, then write class for "ParamThatINeed" and then decode json and use only "ParamThatINeed" object?
Or maybe it's better to beforehand convert my jsonString to another string, which will be only "ParamThatINeed" jsonString object using for example regexp? Or maybe there is a better way?
Your suggested solution is painless and extensible (i.e. if you decide to read an additional field in the future, you just add another field to your object). In general that's exactly how you want to use Gson - construct the necessary Java classes to represent the data you care about and Gson will silently discard the fields you don't care about. For your example that could look like:
private static final Gson GSON = ...;
public static class MyJsonData {
private final ParamThatINeed paramThatINeed;
public ParamThatINeed getParamThatINeed() { ... }
}
public static class ParamThatINeed {
...
}
public static ParamThatINeed extractParamThatINeed(String json) {
return GSON.fromJson(json, MyJsonData.class).getParamThatINeed();
}
You could parse the field yourself as #GuiSim suggests, but this won't scale as easily if your requirements change, and generally speaking the idea behind Gson is to avoid working directly with JsonElement and related classes.
I would definitely discourage a pre-processing step converting the JSON string into a different format. Structured data and string manipulations don't mix, as they lead to brittle code. JSON parsing libraries like Gson exist exactly to avoid such string manipulations.
JsonObject jobj = new Gson().fromJson(YOUR_JSON_HERE, JsonObject.class);
JsonElement value = jobj.get("ParamThatINeed");
value will contain the element associated with the ParamThatINeed key.
I have what I believe should be a simple use case.
I would like to serialize a POJO with type metadata (preferably a simple name I come up with, not the fully qualified class/package name), and later have Jackson deserialize the JSON back into the concrete class it came from by using this metadata. There is no inheritance hierarchy among classes being serialized and deserialized.
My scenario is I have a service which accepts multiple file types. For each file uploaded, the client can retrieve JSON data whose structure and type depends on the file it came from. Thus when I retrieve JSON from the service, it's not known what the concrete class is to deserialize to. I would like Jackson to figure this out based on metadata which it supplies.
For example, I'd like to be able to do this:
String json = ... // get JSON from the service
Object obj = mapper.readValue(json, Object.class) // concrete class is not known
System.out.println(obj.getClass()) // I want this to be MyConcreteClass.class
There is no inheritance hierarchy among JSON types returned.
I don't want to reveal package names or other internal service
details/structure.
I have control over Jackson's serialization process
Relevant question: Can jackson determine root object type to deserialize to when json includes type property?
Thank you so much for your help!
This can be achieved using Jackson's JavaType:
String className = "class.name.from.json.service";
JavaType dtoType = TypeFactory.defaultInstance().constructFromCanonical(className);
Object dto = new ObjectMapper().readValue(InputStream, dtoType);
assert dto.getClass().equals(dtoType.getRawClass());
I'm using Google's JSON library called Gson in one of my project.
I have a code for converting JSON String into object using GSON. I have following method to do that:
public static <T> ApiResponse<T> fromJson(String json)
{
return new Gson().fromJson(json, new TypeToken<ApiResponse<T>>() {}.getType());
}
And it seems to work fine when I do something like that:
ApiResponse<List<JobModel>> response = ApiResponse.fromJson(new String(bytes));
OR
ApiResponse<Double> response = ApiResponse.fromJson(new String(bytes));
But when I try do this:
ApiResponse<JobModel> response = ApiResponse.fromJson(new String(bytes));
Where JobModel is my own class I get the following error:
com.google.gson.internal.LinkedTreeMap cannot be cast to com.pcf.api.model.JobModel
So then I went and implemented another method in ApiResponse:
public static <T> ApiResponse<T> fromJson(String json, TypeToken<ApiResponse<T>> token)
{
return new Gson().fromJson(json, token.getType());
}
And this time call it using function above:
ApiResponse<JobModel> response = ApiResponse.fromJson(new String(bytes), new TypeToken<ApiResponse<JobModel>>() {});
It seems to work fine.
I just can't get my head around this as two functions do exactly same thing. The only difference is that in first it purely relies on Java's generics where in second one I pass TypeToken as a parameter.
Can anyone explain me why is that happening and is there any way to fix it ?
A TypeToken is kind of a hack with generics. It depends on subclassing the type, either with an anonymous or normal class, and using Class#getGenericSuperclass() which states
If the superclass is a parameterized type, the Type object returned
must accurately reflect the actual type parameters used in the source
code.
In other words, in an anonymous class declaration like this
new TypeToken<ApiResponse<T>>() {}.getType())
the superclass is TypeToken<ApiResponse<T>>. It's equivalent to
class Subclass extends TypeToken<ApiResponse<T>>
assuming T was in scope. So when you call Class#getGenericSuperclass(), it will return a ParameterizedType that knows about ApiReponse<T> since that is the actual type parameters used in the source code.
When you call your original function with any of
ApiResponse<List<JobModel>> response = ApiResponse.fromJson(new String(bytes));
ApiResponse<Double> response = ApiResponse.fromJson(new String(bytes));
ApiResponse<JobModel> response = ApiResponse.fromJson(new String(bytes));
although the compiler will infer and bind the corresponding type as a type argument to the method invocation, the internals of the method will pass the same TypeToken object with ApiResponse<T>. Since Gson doesn't know what T is, it will use a default that depends on what it sees in the JSON. If it sees an object, it will use a LinkedTreeMap. If it sees a numeric primitive, it will use the double. Etc.
In the case where you pass a TypeToken,
ApiResponse.fromJson(new String(bytes), new TypeToken<ApiResponse<JobModel>>() {});
it's equivalent to
class Subclass extends TypeToken<ApiResponse<JobModel>>
In other words, Class#getGenericSuperclass() will return a ParameterizedType that has ApiResponse<JobModel>. Gson can extract the JobModel and use it as a hint for deserializing the JSON.
Can anyone explain me why is that happening and is there any way to
fix it ?
There's nothing really to fix. That's just how it works.
Additional reading:
is it possible to use Gson.fromJson() to get ArrayList<ArrayList<String>>?
Gson TypeToken with dynamic ArrayList item type
how does the method infer the type of <T>
Generics work at compile-time,due to lack of reified Generics in Java (it isn't possible to do a T t = new T()), Gson itself is forced to use the TypeToken approach, as you see. Otherwise Gson would have done it in a much more elegant manner.
I'm consuming a web service in my application that will return a list of ID's associated with a name. An example would look like this:
{
"6502": "News",
"6503": "Sports",
"6505": "Opinion",
"6501": "Arts",
"6506": "The Statement"
}
How would I construct a POJO for Gson to deserialize to when all of the fields are dynamic?
How about deserializing into a map?
Gson gson = new Gson();
Type mapType = new TypeToken<Map<String, String>>() {}.getType();
String json = "{'6502':'News','6503':'Sports','6505':'Opinion','6501':'Arts','6506':'The Statement'}";
Map<String, String> map = gson.fromJson(json, mapType);
Using a map sounds reasonable for me (as Java is statically typed). Even if this could work (maybe using JavaCompiler) - accessing the object would not probably be much different from accessing a map.
I don't know Gson that well but I suspect that's not possible. You'd have to know which fields are possible beforehand, although the fields might not be in the Json and thus be null.
You might be able to create classes at runtime by parsing the Json string, but I don't know whether that would be worth the hassle.
If everything is dynamic your best bet would be to deserialize the Json string to maps of strings or arrays etc. like other Json libraries do (I don't know whether Gson can do this as well, but the classes you need are commonly called JSONObject and JSONArray).
So your Json string above would then result in a Map<String, String>.