Question

I need to to deserialize json property (field) absolutely my way using org.codehaus.jackson. I know about custom @JsonDeserializer option, but this is only useful, if you need to deserialize given values of array. I need to deserialize values of array and array itself. To be concrete I need to deserialize ForreignCollection from ORMLite, so I should be able to programatically create ForeignCollectionField and add values into it.

@JsonProperty
@ForeignCollectionField
private ForeignCollection<PerformerLocalized> localized;

Are there any ideas, how to manage it?

Answer 1

@JsonDeserialize can be used BOTH container AND values, like so:

@JsonDeserialize(using=MyContainerDeserializer.class, // this would apply to Collection
   contentUsing=ValueDeserializer.class) // and this to value type

note that normally Collection deserializers do not deal with values, but just delegate it (to make things nicely modular). But you can obviously choose differently with your deserializer; either delegate or directly deal with. If you want to delegate, you probably want to implement ContextualDeserializer interface, to be able to resolve delegatee deserializers.