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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-13T07:56:11+00:00

In my ajax response, I want to return a JSON result. I’m using spring

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In my ajax response, I want to return a JSON result.

I’m using spring mvc, and I have jackson in my pom.xml already.

Now in my controller’s action I have:

  @ResponseBody
    @RequestMapping(value = "/someAjaxResponse", method = RequestMethod.POST)
    public String someAjaxResponse(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) {

    }

What built in java datastructure/type do you suggest I use so I can then convert it to json using jackson?

I don’t want to create a new class for each response type, so I’m looking for a good general purpose java type for this purpose.

Suggestions?

For converting to json, which method would be best as I know jackson has multiple ways converting objects, like ObjectMapper which I believe you create a single instance of and re-use throughout the entire application? So does that mean I mark it as final?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The answer depends on your use case. My suggestion is that you create a custom value object that exactly fit your needs, return it and then let Jackson handle the serializaion for you:

    @ResponseBody
@RequestMapping(value = "/someAjaxResponse", method = RequestMethod.POST)
public CustomValueObject someAjaxResponse(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) {

}

    All that you have to do is to add the <mvc:annotation-driven /> or @EnableWebMvc to your application context, add the Jackson dependencies to your classpath and then the object will be serialized to JSON automatically because you use the @ResponseBody annotation.

    Read more about the MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverterin the Spring reference manual:

    Note, the returned object can have complex structure. Imagine that you would like to provide person data to the client, then you can return a Person object from your controller method:

    public class Person {
    public String getFirstName() {...}
    public int getAge() {...}
    List<String> getEmailAddresses() {...}
    Address getAddress() {...}
}

public class Address {
    public String getStreet() {...}
    public int getHouseNumber() {...}
    public String getCity() {...}
    public int getZIP() {...}
    public String getState() {...}
}

    Which may be serialized to:

    {
    "firstName": "John",
    "lastName": "Doe",
    "age": 42,
    "emailAddresses": [
        "john@doe.com",
        "john.doe@somewhere.com"
    ],
    "address": {
        "street": "First Avenue",
        "houseNumber": 123,
        "city": "Smallville",
        "ZIP": 12345,
        "state": "CA"
    }
}
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