Develop Reference

Parsing API results on Android with Retrofit and Jackson or Gson

I am trying to parse the results of an API call which returns a unique first property.
{
"AlwaysDifferent12345": {
"fixedname1" : "ABC1",
"fixedname2" : "ABC2"
}
}
I am using retrofit2 and jackson/gson and cannot figure out how to cope with dynamic property names within the retrofit2 framework. The following works fine
data class AlwaysDifferentDTO(
#JsonProperty("AlwaysDifferent12345") val alwaysDifferentEntry: AlwaysDifferentEntry
)
I have tried
data class AlwaysDifferentDTO(
#JsonProperty
val response: Map<String, AlwaysDifferentEntry>
)
But this returns errors Can not instantiate value of type... The return value from the API is fixed i.e. map<string, object>.
I have read you can write a deserializer but it looks like I need to deserialize the whole object when all I want to do is just ignore the string associated with the response.
I have read
https://discuss.kotlinlang.org/t/set-dynamic-serializedname-annotation-for-gson-data-class/14758
and several other answers. Given unique properties names are quite common it would be nice to understand how people deal with this when using retrofit2
Thanks

Because the JSON doesn't have a 1-to-1 mapping Jackson can't map it automatically using annotations. You are going to need to make your own Deserializer.
In this tutorial you can learn how to create your own custom Deserializer for Jackson. https://www.baeldung.com/jackson-deserialization
In the tutorial you will see the first line under the deserialize function is
JsonNode node = jp.getCodec().readTree(jp);
using this line you can get the JSON node as a whole and once you have it you can call this function
JsonNode AlwaysDifferent12345Node = node.findParent("fixedname1");
Now that you have that node you can retrieve its value like shown in the rest of the tutorial. Once you have all the values you can return a new instance of the AlwaysDifferentDTO data class.

When working with GSON is it mandatory to have classes for JSON objects that are needed to be excluded?

I am trying to use GSON in order to parse a JSON that include some classes and fields that need to be excluded. Do I have to create classes for such objects, and include such fields in classes I create?

As it take Class<object> classOfT as parameter so we have to pass parameter, but if you dont want to make your custom class you can use it by this way.
Gson gson = new Gson();
gson.fromJson("Response Json String", Object.class);
and you can play with that object in many ways.

You can use #Expose annotation for your fields with serialize and deserializeparameters to false

Just don't add the field to the class and ignore it. There is no need to use all input, even with auto-mapping. Whatever has no #SerializedName annotation will not be mapped- #Expose also controls that. But the actual beauty of GSON is parsing such nested nodes to classes of various types.
just see: #SerializedName, #Expose.

How to handle such a json properly?

The problem is next.
In response I have JSON like
{
object: {
// a lot of different fields
}
}
I use Retrofit with gson parser. What I really need is just this object. I don't want to create class for response with the only one field. All responses server send in a such manner. As far I understand somewhere I need place simple code for fetching that one object and then use default parser for it.
Probably sorry for stupid question. I used Volley and there was quite a different approach.

Instead of creating a special class to handle this (and another special class for every other server response), just use Map<String, YourRealObjectType>. Then use this method to extract the YourRealObjectType instance for each response:
public static <T> T getFirstValue(Map<String, T> map) {
return map.values().iterator().next();
}

you can convert class into JsonObject class. then cal iterate all the elements in it one by one
#Get
ObservablegetData();
Note : use JsonObject not JSONObject

Is there any way to directly handle json in android/java without convert [duplicate]

I was wondering if somewhere out there exists a java library able to query a JSONObject. In more depth I'm looking for something like:
String json = "{ data: { data2 : { value : 'hello'}}}";
...
// Somehow we managed to convert json to jsonObject
...
String result = jsonObject.getAsString("data.data2.value");
System.out.println(result);
I expect to get "hello" as output.
So far, the fastest way I have found is using Gson:
jsonObject.getAsJsonObject("data").getAsJsonObject().get("data2").getAsJsonObject("value").getAsString();
It's not actually easy to write and read. Is there something faster?

I've just unexpectedly found very interesting project: JSON Path
JsonPath is to JSON what XPATH is to XML, a simple way to extract parts of a given document.
With this library you can do what you are requesting even easier, then my previous suggestion:
String hello = JsonPath.read(json, "$.data.data2.value");
System.out.println(hello); //prints hello
Hope this might be helpful either.

While not exactly the same, Jackson has Tree Model representation similar to Gson:
JsonNode root = objectMapper.readTree(jsonInput);
return root.get("data").get("data2").get("value").asText();
so you need to traverse it step by step.
EDIT (August 2015)
There actually is now (since Jackson 2.3) support for JSON Pointer expressions with Jackson. So you could alternatively use:
return root.at("/data/data2/value").asText();

First of all, I would recommend consider JSON object binding.
But in case if you get arbitrary JSON objects and you would like process them in the way you described, I would suggest combine Jackson JSON processor along with Apache's Commons Beanutils.
The idea is the following: Jackson by default process all JSON's as java.util.Map instances, meanwhile Commons Beanutils simplifies property access for objects, including arrays and Map supports.
So you may use it something like this:
//actually it is a Map instance with maps-fields within
Object jsonObj = objectMapper.readValue(json, Object.class);
Object hello = PropertyUtils.getProperty(jsonObj, "data.data2.value")
System.out.println(hello); //prints hello

You can use org.json
String json = "{ data: { data2 : { value : 'hello'}}}";
org.json.JSONObject obj = new org.json.JSONObject(json);
System.out.println(obj.query("/data/data2/value"));

I think no way.
Consider a java class
class Student {
Subject subject = new Subject();
}
class Subject {
String name;
}
Here if we want to access subject name then
Student stud = new Student();
stud.subject.name;
We cant access name directly, if so then we will not get correct subject name. Like here:
jsonObject.getAsJsonObject("data")
.getAsJsonObject()
.get("data2")
.getAsJsonObject("value")
.getAsString();
If you want to use same like java object then use
ClassName classObject = new Gson().fromJson(JsonString, ClassName.class);
ClassName must have all fields to match jsonstring. If you have a jsonobject inside a jsonobject then you have to create separate class like I'm doing in Student and Subject class.

Using Java JSON API 1.1.x (javax.json) one can make use of new JavaPointer interface. Instance implementing this interface can be considered to some extend as kind of XPath expression analog (see RFC-6901 for details). So in your case you could write this:
import javax.json.*;
//...
var jp = Json.createPointer("/data/data2/value");
System.out.println(jp.getValue(jsonObject));
In 1.1.4 version of JSON there's also nice addition to JsonStructure interface (which is implemented by JsonObject and JsonArray), namely getValue(String jsonPointer). So it all comes down to this simple one-liner:
System.out.println(jsonObject.getValue("/data/data2/value"));

Parsing an object with variable type in gson

I have something like the following json string:
{"values" : [
{ "group":"A"
"rating":2
},
{
"group":"B"
"language":"english"
}
]
}
As you can see, "values" is an array, with different type of objects. One type can contain a string and an integer, and the other type contains a string and another string.
How do I deal with this?

Sorry, I didn't notice originally you wrote "gson". I'm not sure you can do it, and here's not me saying it.

Do some thing like the following
List myStrings = new ArrayList();
myStrings = gson.fromJson(json,myStrings.getClass());
Iterator myIterator = myStrings.iterator();
boolean b;
while(myIterator.hasNext()){
Object o =myIterator.next();
b=o instanceof String;
System.out.println("...."+b);
}

My approach would probably be to implement a polymorphic deserialization solution.
Gson does not currently have a simple mechanism for polymorphic deserialization, other than implementing custom deserialization processing. The next release looks like it will provide a built-in solution.
Previous StackOverflow.com Questions And Answers (Some With Examples) On This Topic:
Deserialising a generic with unknown compile time type where a field indicates the type
Parse JSON with no specific structure for a field with GSON
json object serialization/deserialization using google gson
Polymorphism with gson
Specific to the original question, it looks like the "group" element would be used to distinguish between different types.
FWIW, Jackson released a built-in solution to this problem many moons ago.