Jackson JSON custom serialization for certain fields

You can implement a custom serializer as follows:

public class Person {
    public String name;
    public int age;
    @JsonSerialize(using = IntToStringSerializer.class, as=String.class)
    public int favoriteNumber:
}


public class IntToStringSerializer extends JsonSerializer<Integer> {

    @Override
    public void serialize(Integer tmpInt, 
                          JsonGenerator jsonGenerator, 
                          SerializerProvider serializerProvider) 
                          throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
        jsonGenerator.writeObject(tmpInt.toString());
    }
}

Java should handle the autoboxing from int to Integer for you.

Add a @JsonProperty annotated getter, which returns a String, for the favoriteNumber field:

public class Person {
    public String name;
    public int age;
    private int favoriteNumber;

    public Person(String name, int age, int favoriteNumber) {
        this.name = name;
        this.age = age;
        this.favoriteNumber = favoriteNumber;
    }

    @JsonProperty
    public String getFavoriteNumber() {
        return String.valueOf(favoriteNumber);
    }

    public static void main(String... args) throws Exception {
        Person p = new Person("Joe", 25, 123);
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        System.out.println(mapper.writeValueAsString(p)); 
        // {"name":"Joe","age":25,"favoriteNumber":"123"}
    }
}

Jackson-databind (at least 2.1.3) provides special ToStringSerializer (com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ser.std.ToStringSerializer)

Example:

public class Person {
    public String name;
    public int age;
    @JsonSerialize(using = ToStringSerializer.class)
    public int favoriteNumber:
}