jackson - do not serialize lazy objects

Maybe this is related to a known issue about lazy loading.

I don't use jackson-datatype-hibernate, but what I've done to solve the same problem is to get the persistent collection out of the picture by using a DTO instead of serializing a Hibernate object directly. Tools like Dozer can help you out with that. Alternatively, there's a small utility I wrote to do mappings like this.

If you just want to experiment with what a DTO could look like, you can replace the unloaded persistent collection with a regular empty collection, like books.setGenre(new ArrayList<>()); Unfortunately I don't know of a way to tell if a lazily loaded object has been loaded or not, so you can't do this reassignment automatically. The places where you replace persistent collections would need to be determined by you on a case by case basis.

You can do this with the Jackson @JsonInclude annotation.

According to the latest version's javadoc (2.4 right now) you can specify with a simple annotation if to include or not the annotated property if the field value is null or empty.

By default, it's JsonInclude.Include.ALWAYS, and this means that even if your lazily not-loaded values are null, Jackson does include the property.

Specifying to don't include empty or null values can significantly reduce the size of the JSON response, with all the benefits included..

If you want to change this behavior, you can add the annotation at class-level or single property/getterMethod level.

Try to add the following annotations to the fields you don't want to include if empty:

@JsonInclude(JsonInclude.Include.NON_EMPTY)
@OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY, mappedBy = ("movie"),cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
private List<Genre> genre;

You can use a spring configuration to disable force lazy loading by default!

@Configuration
public class JacksonConfig {
    
    @Bean
    public ObjectMapper objectMapper() {
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        Hibernate5Module hibernate5Module = new Hibernate5Module();
        hibernate5Module.configure(Feature.FORCE_LAZY_LOADING, false);
        // Enable below line to switch lazy loaded json from null to a blank object!
        //hibernate5Module.configure(Feature.SERIALIZE_IDENTIFIER_FOR_LAZY_NOT_LOADED_OBJECTS, true);
        mapper.registerModule(hibernate5Module);
        return mapper;
    }
}

You can use Jackson's JSON Filter Feature:

@Entity
@JsonFilter("Book") 
public class Book {
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.AUTO)
    private long id;

    @Column
    private String title;

    @OneToMany(fetch = FetchType.LAZY, mappedBy = ("movie"),cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
    private List<Genre> genre;
} 

@Entity
@JsonFilter("Genre")
public class Genre {
   ...
}

Then in the Controller you specify what to filter:

@Controller
public class BookController {
      @Autowired
      private ObjectMapper objectMapper;

      @Autowird
      private BookRepository bookRepository;
      
       @RequestMapping(value = "/book", method = RequestMethod.GET, produces =  "application/json")
       @ResponseBody
       public ResponseEntity<String> getBooks() {

          final List<Book> books = booksRepository.findAll();
          final SimpleFilterProvider filter = new SimpleFilterProvider();
          filter.addFilter("Book", SimpleBeanPropertyFilter.serializeAllExcept("genre");
          return new ResponseEntity<>(objectMapper.writer(filter).writeValueAsString(books), HttpStatus.OK)
       }
      
}

In this way, you can control when you want to filter the lazy relation at runtime