Spring/Jackson Mapping Inner JSON Objects

Question

I have a RESTful web service that provides JSON that I am consuming. I am using Spring 3.2 and Spring's MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter. My JSON looks like this:

{
"Daives": {
    "Daive": {},
    "Daive": {},
    "Daive": {},
    "Daive": {}
}

}

Now everything I have read seems to indicate that this JSON should be refactored to an array of JSON Daives. However, this is valid JSON so I want to make sure that I am thinking correctly before going back to the service provider to ask for changes. In the format above, I would have to know ahead of time how many Daives there are going to be such that my DTO accounted for them. The handy dandy Jackson mapper isn't going work with this kind of JSON setup. If the JSON was altered to provide and Array of JSON Daives, I could use a List to dynamically map them using Spring/Jackson. Am I correct? Thanks :)

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:07

According to this thread, the JSON spec itself does not forbid multiple fields with the same name (in your case, multiple fields named "Daive" in the object "Daives").

However, most parsers will either return an error or ignore any value but the last one. As you said, putting these values into an array seems much more sensible; and indeed, you'll be able to map this array to a List with Jackson.

Spring/Jackson Mapping Inner JSON Objects

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