Question

I got the following request from an Android developer:

Would you change the webservice back-end so that it returnes empty
strings for empty fields instead of null.

The Android json parser converts null to a string containing “null”.

The code:

import com.google.gson.Gson;
//...
private OrganizationSearchResult result;
//...
Gson gson = new Gson();
result = gson.fromJson(resultString, OrganizationSearchResult.class);

Is this a known issue?

If so, is there a known work-around for it?

Answer 1

I dont know what you are using for parsing the json and the JSONObject class in android sdk doesnt do that.

Take a look at the following class

http://developer.android.com/reference/org/json/JSONObject.html

Check out has and isNULL of the above method.

I think GSON automatically handles the null in json by converting them to java null.