How do I exclude fields with Jackson not using annotations?

I need to exclude some fields by names before rendering. The list of fields is dynamic, so I can't use annotations.

I've tried to create custom serializer but I can't get field name there.

In GSON I've used ExclusionStrategy, but Jackson has no such functionality. Is there an equivalent?

The below example of excluding fields by name is from my blog post, Gson v Jackson - Part 4. (Search for the PropertyFilterMixIn.) This example demonstrates using a FilterProvider with a SimpleBeanPropertyFilter to serializeAllExcept a user-specified list of field names.

@JsonFilter("filter properties by name")  
class PropertyFilterMixIn {}  

class Bar  
{  
  public String id = "42";  
  public String name = "Fred";  
  public String color = "blue";  
  public Foo foo = new Foo();  
}  

class Foo  
{  
  public String id = "99";  
  public String size = "big";  
  public String height = "tall";  
}  

public class JacksonFoo  
{  
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception  
  {  
    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();  
    mapper.getSerializationConfig().addMixInAnnotations(  
        Object.class, PropertyFilterMixIn.class);  

    String[] ignorableFieldNames = { "id", "color" };  
    FilterProvider filters = new SimpleFilterProvider()  
      .addFilter("filter properties by name",   
          SimpleBeanPropertyFilter.serializeAllExcept(  
              ignorableFieldNames));  
    ObjectWriter writer = mapper.writer(filters);  

    System.out.println(writer.writeValueAsString(new Bar()));  
    // output:  
    // {"name":"James","foo":{"size":"big","height":"tall"}}  
  }  
} 

(Note: The relevant API may have changed slightly with a recent Jackson release.)

While the example does use a seemingly unnecessary annotation, the annotation is not applied to the fields to be excluded. (To help get the API changed to simplify the necessary configuration a bit, please don't hesitate to vote for implementation of issue JACKSON-274.

I wrote a library to deal with a similar use case. I needed to programmatically ignore fields based on the user requesting data. The normal Jackson options were just too heavy-handed, and I hated the way it made my code look.

The library makes this a whole lot easier to understand. It allows you to simply do this:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.module.SimpleModule;
import com.monitorjbl.json.JsonView;
import com.monitorjbl.json.JsonViewSerializer;
import static com.monitorjbl.json.Match.match;

//initialize jackson
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
SimpleModule module = new SimpleModule();
module.addSerializer(JsonView.class, new JsonViewSerializer());
mapper.registerModule(module);

 //get a list of the objects
List<MyObject> list = myObjectService.list();

String json;
if(user.getRole().equals('ADMIN')){
    json = mapper.writeValueAsString(list);
} else {
    json = mapper.writeValueAsString(JsonView.with(list)
        .onClass(MyObject.class, match()
           .exclude("*")
           .include("name")));
}

System.out.println(json);

The code is available on GitHub, hope it helps!