Serialization and Deserialization Issues in Spring REST
By Kürşat Kutlu Aydemir
March 17, 2020
Spring Boot projects primarily use the JSON library Jackson to serialize and deserialize objects. It is especially useful that Jackson automatically serializes objects returned from REST APIs and deserializes complex type parameters like @RequestBody.
In a Spring Boot project the automatically registered MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter is usually enough and makes JSON conversions simple, but this may have some issues which need custom configuration. Let’s go over a few good practices for them.
Configuring a Custom Jackson ObjectMapper
In Spring REST projects a custom implementation of MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter helps to create the custom ObjectMapper, as seen below. Whatever custom implementation you need to add to the custom ObjectMapper can be handled by this custom converter:
public class CustomHttpMessageConverter extends MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter {
private ObjectMapper initCustomObjectMapper() {
ObjectMapper customObjectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
return customObjectMapper;
}
// ...
}
Additionally, some MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter methods, such as writeInternal, can be useful to override in certain cases. I’ll give a few examples in this article.
In Spring Boot you also need to register a custom MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter like below:
@Bean
MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter mappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter() {
return new CustomHttpMessageConverter();
}
Serialization
Pretty-printing
Pretty-printing in Jackson is disabled by default. By enabling SerializationFeature.INDENT_OUTPUT in the ObjectMapper configuration pretty-print output is enabled (as in the example below). Normally a custom ObjectMapper is not necessary for setting the pretty-print configuration. In some cases, however, like one case of mine in a recent customer project, this configuration might be necessary.
For example, passing a URL parameter can enable pretty-printing. In this case having a custom ObjectMapper with pretty-print enabled and keeping the default ObjectMapper of MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter as is could be a better option.
public class CustomHttpMessageConverter extends MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter {
private ObjectMapper initiatePrettyObjectMapper() {
ObjectMapper customObjectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
customObjectMapper.configure(SerializationFeature.INDENT_OUTPUT, true);
// additional indentation for arrays
DefaultPrettyPrinter pp = new DefaultPrettyPrinter();
pp.indentArraysWith(new DefaultIndenter());
customObjectMapper.setDefaultPrettyPrinter(pp);
return customObjectMapper;
}
}
Conditionally Filtering the Fields
When serializing a response object you may need to include or ignore one or more fields depending on their values. Let’s assume a model class UserResponse like below.
Notice that we used @JsonIgnore which is completely discarding the annotated field from serialization. Conditional filtering is different and it can be done using SimpleBeanPropertyFilter objects set to the filter provider of the ObjectMapper objects. Also notice that @JsonFilter annotation is used for UserResponse which points to which filter will be used by ObjectMapper during the serialization.
@JsonFilter("userCodeFilter")
public class UserResponse {
public Integer userId;
public String username;
public Integer code;
@JsonIgnore
public String status;
}
Here we add a filter called userCodeFilter—like the one we added to the custom ObjectMapper of CustomHttpMessageConverter—which will include the UserResponse class’s code field in the serialization if its value is greater than 0. You can add multiple filters to ObjectMapper for different models.
public class CustomHttpMessageConverter extends MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter {
private ObjectMapper initiatePrettyObjectMapper() {
ObjectMapper customObjectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
customObjectMapper.configure(SerializationFeature.INDENT_OUTPUT, true);
// additional indentation for arrays
DefaultPrettyPrinter pp = new DefaultPrettyPrinter();
pp.indentArraysWith(new DefaultIndenter());
customObjectMapper.setDefaultPrettyPrinter(pp);
PropertyFilter userCodeFilter = new SimpleBeanPropertyFilter() {
@Override
public void serializeAsField(Object pojo, JsonGenerator jgen, SerializerProvider provider, PropertyWriter writer)
throws Exception {
if (include(writer)) {
if (!writer.getName().equals("code")) {
writer.serializeAsField(pojo, jgen, provider);
return;
}
int intValue = ((UserResponse) pojo).code;
if (intValue > 0) {
writer.serializeAsField(pojo, jgen, provider);
}
} else if (!jgen.canOmitFields()) {
writer.serializeAsOmittedField(pojo, jgen, provider);
}
}
@Override
protected boolean include(BeanPropertyWriter writer) {
return true;
}
@Override
protected boolean include(PropertyWriter writer) {
return true;
}
};
FilterProvider filters = new SimpleFilterProvider().addFilter("userCodeFilter", userCodeFilter);
customObjectMapper.setFilterProvider(filters);
return customObjectMapper;
}
}
Deserialization
JSON String Parse Error Handling in Spring Boot
This one is a little tricky. Deserialization of a JSON @RequestParam object can cause parsing errors if the JSON object is not well-formed. The errors thrown in Jackson’s deserialization level just before it’s pushed to Spring Boot occur at that level, so Spring Boot doesn’t catch these errors.
Deserialization of Jackson maps JSON to POJOs and finally returns the expected Java class object. If the JSON is not well-formed, parsing cannot be done and MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter internally throws a parsing error. Since this exception is not caught by Spring Boot and no object is returned, the REST controller would be unresponsive, having a badly-formed JSON payload.
Here we can override the internal read method of MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter, hack the ReadJavaType with a customReadJavaType method, and make it return an internal error when the deserialization fails to parse the JSON input, rather than throwing an exception which is not seen or handled by Spring Boot.
@Override
public Object read(Type type, @Nullable Class<?> contextClass, HttpInputMessage inputMessage)
throws IOException, HttpMessageNotReadableException {
objectMapper.enable(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES);
JavaType javaType = getJavaType(type, contextClass);
return customReadJavaType(javaType, inputMessage);
}
private Object customReadJavaType(JavaType javaType, HttpInputMessage inputMessage) throws IOException {
try {
if (inputMessage instanceof MappingJacksonInputMessage) {
Class<?> deserializationView = ((MappingJacksonInputMessage) inputMessage).getDeserializationView();
if (deserializationView != null) {
return this.objectMapper.readerWithView(deserializationView).forType(javaType).
readValue(inputMessage.getBody());
}
}
return this.objectMapper.readValue(inputMessage.getBody(), javaType);
}
catch (InvalidDefinitionException ex) {
//throw new HttpMessageConversionException("Type definition error: " + ex.getType(), ex);
return "Type definition error";
}
catch (JsonProcessingException ex) {
//throw new HttpMessageNotReadableException("JSON parse error: " + ex.getOriginalMessage(), ex, inputMessage);
return "JSON parse error";
}
}
This way you can return errors occurring at the deserialization level to Spring Boot, which expects a deserialized object but gets a String value which can be caught and translated into a ControllerAdvice handled exception. This also makes it easier to catch JSON parsing errors without using any third party JSON libraries like Gson.
json rest java frameworks spring
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