Question

Using the Gson library, how do I convert a JSON string to an ArrayList of a custom class JsonLog? Basically, JsonLog is an interface implemented by different kinds of logs made by my Android app–SMS logs, call logs, data logs–and this ArrayList is a collection of all of them. I keep getting an error in line 6.

public static void log(File destination, JsonLog log) {
    Collection<JsonLog> logs = null;
    if (destination.exists()) {
        Gson gson = new Gson();
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(destination));
        logs = gson.fromJson(br, ArrayList<JsonLog>.class); // line 6
        // logs.add(log);
        // serialize "logs" again
    }
}

It seems the compiler doesn’t understand I’m referring to a typed ArrayList. What do I do?

Answer 1

You may use TypeToken to load the json string into a custom object.

logs = gson.fromJson(br, new TypeToken<List<JsonLog>>(){}.getType());

Documentation:

Represents a generic type T.

Java doesn’t yet provide a way to represent generic types, so this class does. Forces clients to create a subclass of this class which enables retrieval the type information even at runtime.

For example, to create a type literal for List<String>, you can create an empty anonymous inner class:

TypeToken<List<String>> list = new TypeToken<List<String>>() {};

This syntax cannot be used to create type literals that have wildcard parameters, such as Class<?> or List<? extends CharSequence>.

Kotlin:

If you need to do it in Kotlin you can do it like this:

val myType = object : TypeToken<List<JsonLong>>() {}.type
val logs = gson.fromJson<List<JsonLong>>(br, myType)

Or you can see this answer for various alternatives.