Convert JsonNode into POJO

This may seem a little unusual, but I am looking for an efficient way to transform/map a JsonNode into a POJO.

I store some of my Model's information in json files and I have to support a couple of version of my model.

What I do is load the json file in memory in a JsonNode, apply a couple of versioning strategies to make it match the latest version of my Model.

    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    BufferedReader fileReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(projPath));

    JsonNode rootNode = mapper.readTree(fileReader);

    //Upgrade our file in memory
    applyVersioningStrategy(rootNode);

    ProjectModel project = mapJsonNodeToProject(rootNode);

Unless there's a faster way to do it, I will probably end up simply manually applying the JsonNodes to my Model

In Jackson 2.4, you can convert as follows:

MyClass newJsonNode = jsonObjectMapper.treeToValue(someJsonNode, MyClass.class);

where jsonObjectMapper is a Jackson ObjectMapper.

In older versions of Jackson, it would be

MyClass newJsonNode = jsonObjectMapper.readValue(someJsonNode, MyClass.class);

This should do the trick:

mapper.readValue(fileReader, MyClass.class);

I say should because I'm using that with a String, not a BufferedReader but it should still work.

Here's my code:

String inputString = // I grab my string here
MySessionClass sessionObject;
try {
    ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
    sessionObject = objectMapper.readValue(inputString, MySessionClass.class);

Here's the official documentation for that call: http://jackson.codehaus.org/1.7.9/javadoc/org/codehaus/jackson/map/ObjectMapper.html#readValue(java.lang.String, java.lang.Class)

You can also define a custom deserializer when you instantiate the ObjectMapper: http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonHowToCustomDeserializers

Edit: I just remembered something else. If your object coming in has more properties than the POJO has and you just want to ignore the extras you'll want to set this:

    objectMapper.configure(DeserializationConfig.Feature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES, false);

Or you'll get an error that it can't find the property to set into.

If you're using org.codehaus.jackson, this has been possible since 1.6. You can convert a JsonNode to a POJO with ObjectMapper#readValue: http://jackson.codehaus.org/1.9.4/javadoc/org/codehaus/jackson/map/ObjectMapper.html#readValue(org.codehaus.jackson.JsonNode, java.lang.Class)

    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    JsonParser jsonParser = mapper.getJsonFactory().createJsonParser("{\"foo\":\"bar\"}");
    JsonNode tree = jsonParser.readValueAsTree();
    // Do stuff to the tree
    mapper.readValue(tree, Foo.class);