How to create a custom deserializer in Jackson for a generic type?
You can implement a custom JsonDeserializer
for your generic type which also implements ContextualDeserializer
.
For example, suppose we have the following simple wrapper type that contains a generic value:
public static class Wrapper<T> {
public T value;
}
We now want to deserialize JSON that looks like this:
{
"name": "Alice",
"age": 37
}
into an instance of a class that looks like this:
public static class Person {
public Wrapper<String> name;
public Wrapper<Integer> age;
}
Implementing ContextualDeserializer
allows us to create a specific deserializer for each field in the Person
class, based on the generic type parameters of the field. This allows us to deserialize the name as a string, and the age as an integer.
The complete deserializer looks like this:
public static class WrapperDeserializer extends JsonDeserializer<Wrapper<?>> implements ContextualDeserializer {
private JavaType valueType;
@Override
public JsonDeserializer<?> createContextual(DeserializationContext ctxt, BeanProperty property) throws JsonMappingException {
JavaType wrapperType = property.getType();
JavaType valueType = wrapperType.containedType(0);
WrapperDeserializer deserializer = new WrapperDeserializer();
deserializer.valueType = valueType;
return deserializer;
}
@Override
public Wrapper<?> deserialize(JsonParser parser, DeserializationContext ctxt) throws IOException {
Wrapper<?> wrapper = new Wrapper<>();
wrapper.value = ctxt.readValue(parser, valueType);
return wrapper;
}
}
It is best to look at createContextual
here first, as this will be called first by Jackson. We read the type of the field out of the BeanProperty
(e.g. Wrapper<String>
) and then extract the first generic type parameter (e.g. String
). We then create a new deserializer and store the inner type as the valueType
.
Once deserialize
is called on this newly created deserializer, we can simply ask Jackson to deserialize the value as the inner type rather than as the whole wrapper type, and return a new Wrapper
containing the deserialized value.
In order to register this custom deserializer, we then need to create a module that contains it, and register that module:
SimpleModule module = new SimpleModule()
.addDeserializer(Wrapper.class, new WrapperDeserializer());
ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
objectMapper.registerModule(module);
If we then try to deserialize the example JSON from above, we can see that it works as expected:
Person person = objectMapper.readValue(json, Person.class);
System.out.println(person.name.value); // prints Alice
System.out.println(person.age.value); // prints 37
There are some more details about how contextual deserializers work in the Jackson documentation.
If the target itself is a generic type then property will be null, for that you'll need to get the valueTtype from the DeserializationContext:
@Override
public JsonDeserializer<?> createContextual(DeserializationContext ctxt, BeanProperty property) throws JsonMappingException {
if (property == null) { // context is generic
JMapToListParser parser = new JMapToListParser();
parser.valueType = ctxt.getContextualType().containedType(0);
return parser;
} else { // property is generic
JavaType wrapperType = property.getType();
JavaType valueType = wrapperType.containedType(0);
JMapToListParser parser = new JMapToListParser();
parser.valueType = valueType;
return parser;
}
}
This is how you can access/resolve {targetClass} for a Custom Jackson Deserializer. Of course you need to implement ContextualDeserializer interface for this.
public class WPCustomEntityDeserializer extends JsonDeserializer<Object>
implements ContextualDeserializer {
private Class<?> targetClass;
@Override
public Object deserialize(JsonParser jp, DeserializationContext ctxt)
throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
ObjectCodec oc = jp.getCodec();
JsonNode node = oc.readTree(jp);
//Your code here to customize deserialization
// You can access {target class} as targetClass (defined class field here)
//This should build some {deserializedClasObject}
return deserializedClasObject;
}
@Override
public JsonDeserializer<?> createContextual(DeserializationContext ctxt, BeanProperty property){
//Find here the targetClass to be deserialized
String targetClassName=ctxt.getContextualType().toCanonical();
try {
targetClass = Class.forName(targetClassName);
} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
return this;
}
}