Spring, Jackson and Customization (e.g. CustomDeserializer)

Being still a little unfamiliar with Spring, I have encountered a problem that makes it necessary implementing my a custom deserialzer for Jackson. The procedure is described in a small tutorial, however, I am stuck with Spring. I do not understand, where

 ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

in Spring MVC is carried out when json is deserializes by a method of a controller class. So I do not know, what to do in order to replace the default deserializer by a custom deserialiser.

Any suggestions most welcome.

You don't say how you're using Jackson in Spring, so I'll assume you're using it through <mvc:annotation-driven/> and the @RequestBody and/or @ResponseBody annotations.

One of the things that <mvc:annotation-driven/> does is to register a AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter bean which comes with a number of pre-configured HttpMessageConverter beans, including MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter, which handles marshalling to and from Jackson-annotated model classes.

Now MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter has a setObjectMapper() method, which allows you to override the default ObjectMapper. But since MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter is created behind the scenes by <mvc:annotation-driven/>, you can't get to it.

However, <mvc:annotation-driven/> is just a convenient short-cut. It's just as a valid to declare your own AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter bean, injecting into it your own MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter bean (via the messageConverters property), and injecting your own customized ObjectMapper into that.

You then have the problem of how to build a custom ObjectMapper, since it's not a very Spring-friendly class. I suggest writing your own simple implementation of FactoryBean.

So you'd end up with something like this:

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter">
   <property name="messageConverters">
      <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter">
         <property name="objectMapper">
            <bean class="com.x.MyObjectMapperFactoryBean"/>
         </property>
      </bean>
   </property>
</bean>

New way to do this in Spring 3.1:
http://magicmonster.com/kb/prg/java/spring/webmvc/mvc_spring_config_namespace.html

http://blog.springsource.org/2011/02/21/spring-3-1-m1-mvc-namespace-enhancements-and-configuration/

Allows you to do something like this:

<mvc:annotation-driven>
      <mvc:message-converters>
          <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter">
              <property name="objectMapper" ref="customObjectMapper"/>
          </bean>
      </mvc:message-converters>
  </mvc:annotation-driven>

The solution referenced by Rakesh likely works with Spring MVC 3.0 but with 3.1 some of the MVC infrastructure has changed. As a result you may not have an AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter bean registered in your application context and you'll end up with a BeanCreationException at initialization time.

For Spring MVC 3.1 the mvc:annotation-driven element will create a RequestMappingHandlerAdapter for you, so you should autowire that type instead. It will still provide access to the list of registered HttpMessageConverters and allow you to set the ObjectMapper property on the MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter. This also requires a slight change within the init. method to the type of the HttpMessageConverters reference.

The updated class looks like:

@Component
public class JacksonFix {
    private RequestMappingHandlerAdapter requestMappingHandlerAdapter;
    private CustomObjectMapper objectMapper;

    @PostConstruct
    public void init() {
        List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> messageConverters = requestMappingHandlerAdapter.getMessageConverters();
        for (HttpMessageConverter<?> messageConverter : messageConverters) {
            if (messageConverter instanceof MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter) {
                MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter m = (MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter) messageConverter;
                m.setObjectMapper(objectMapper);
            }
        }
    }

    // this will exist due to the <mvc:annotation-driven/> bean
    @Autowired
    public void setRequestMappingHandlerAdapter(RequestMappingHandlerAdapter requestMappingHandlerAdapter) {
        this.requestMappingHandlerAdapter = requestMappingHandlerAdapter;
    }

    @Autowired
    public void setObjectMapper(CustomObjectMapper objectMapper) {
        this.objectMapper = objectMapper;
    }
}

UPDATE: It turns out the absolute easiest thing to do with Spring 3.1 is to add some additional configuration to your MVC configuration:

<mvc:annotation-driven conversion-service="applicationConversionService">
    <mvc:message-converters register-defaults="true">
        <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter">
            <property name="objectMapper" ref="customObjectMapper" />
        </bean>
    </mvc:message-converters>
</mvc:annotation-driven>

That will add a new instance of MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter with the custom ObjectMapper before any of the default HttpMessageConverters (which are still present due to register-defaults="true").

In my case (Spring 3.2.4 and Jackson 2.3.1), XML configuration for custom serializer:

<mvc:annotation-driven>
    <mvc:message-converters register-defaults="false">
        <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter">
            <property name="objectMapper">
                <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.Jackson2ObjectMapperFactoryBean">
                    <property name="serializers">
                        <array>
                            <bean class="com.example.business.serializer.json.CustomObjectSerializer"/>
                        </array>
                    </property>
                </bean>
            </property>
        </bean>
    </mvc:message-converters>
</mvc:annotation-driven>

was in unexplained way overwritten back to default by something.

This worked for me:

CustomObject.java

@JsonSerialize(using = CustomObjectSerializer.class)
public class CustomObject {

    private Long value;

    public Long getValue() {
        return value;
    }

    public void setValue(Long value) {
        this.value = value;
    }
}

CustomObjectSerializer.java

public class CustomObjectSerializer extends JsonSerializer<CustomObject> {

    @Override
    public void serialize(CustomObject value, JsonGenerator jgen,
        SerializerProvider provider) throws IOException,JsonProcessingException {
        jgen.writeStartObject();
        jgen.writeNumberField("y", value.getValue());
        jgen.writeEndObject();
    }

    @Override
    public Class<CustomObject> handledType() {
        return CustomObject.class;
    }
}

No XML configuration (<mvc:message-converters>(...)</mvc:message-converters>) is needed in my solution.