Question

I will try to explain what I’m trying to accomplish as clear as I can.

I’m writing the back end of a web application, that uses REST APIs for extracting data that is used for reports in the client side.
The framework I’m writing on uses Codehaus jackson for parsing the requests from JSON to data objects (data beans).
I have a bunch of APIs of this sort, 10-15.
each of them gets a different request object from the client side (though some inheritance do exist).
what I want to do is add logging (using log4j) for each of these APIs so that when I enter each of the methods the request data object will be logged.
the simple solution would be to implement a toString() method for each of these data objects, but I want to avoid going over all of these data objects and see if there’s a solution similiar to the way that jackson parses the JSON into an object.
I.e have the object converted back to its textual format in order to put it into the log.

I assume there’s so easy way to do so.

This is an example of a REST API and its data bean:

@POST
@Path("/path123/")
@Produces(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
@Consumes(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON)
public Response getSomeData(@Context HttpServletRequest httpServletRequest, DataBeanExample bean){
    DataBeanExample resultBean;
    //DO SOME STUFF , for example take the bean, extract parameters from it and call some other api.
    return Response.ok(resultBean, MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON).build();

}


@XmlAccessorType(XmlAccessType.FIELD)
@XmlRootElement(name = "DataBeanExample")

public class DataBeanExample{

@XmlElement(name = "timeFrame", required = true)
private String timeFrame = "";
@XmlElement(name = "timeFrom",required = true)
private long timeFrom;
@XmlElement(name = "timeTo",required = true)
private long timeTo;

public String getTimeFrame() {
    return timeFrame;
}

public void setTimeFrame(String timeFrame) {
    this.timeFrame = timeFrame;
}

public long getTimeTo() {
    return timeTo;
}

public void setTimeTo(long timeTo) {
    this.timeTo = timeTo;
}

public long getTimeFrom() {
    return timeFrom;
}

public void setTimeFrom(long timeFrom) {
    this.timeFrom = timeFrom;
}

}

In the example, what I want to do is at the beginning of “getSomeData” take the object bean and have it logged.

Answer 1

Probably this might work

new ObjectMapper().writeValue(System.out, dataBeanExampleInstance)

or writeValueAsString