Configure Jackson to throw an exception when a field is missing

Question

I have a class like this:

public class Person {   private String name;   public String getName(){     return name;   } } 

I am using an ObjectMapper configured like this:

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper(); mapper.configure(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES, false); 

I have a String str that contains this { "address" : "something" }. Note that there is no "name" field in the json. If I do something like this:

mapper.readValue(str, Person.class); 

then I actually get back a Person object with name set to null. Is there a way to configure the mapper to throw an exception instead, or return a null reference instead of a Person? I want Jackson to consider missing fields a failure and don't want to do explicit null checks on the resulting object's fields.

Answer 1

As of Jackson 2.6, there is a way, but it does not work on class attribute annotations, only constructor annotations:

/* DOES *NOT* THROW IF bar MISSING */ public class Foo {         @JsonProperty(value = "bar", required = true)     public int bar; }  /* DOES THROW IF bar MISSING */ public class Foo {     public int bar;     @JsonCreator     public Foo(@JsonProperty(value = "bar", required = true) int bar) {         this.bar = bar;     } }