How to ignore new fields for an object model with Firebase 1.0.2

Question

I'm using the last version at the moment of Firebase dependency, which is 1.0.2 and I'm having problems into getting my pojos parsed correctly.

The thing is, at any time the schema can changed but I don't want my app to crash with this:

D/AndroidRuntime(14097): Shutting down VM W/dalvikvm(14097): threadid=1: thread exiting with uncaught exception (group=0x40a451f8) E/AndroidRuntime(14097): FATAL EXCEPTION: main E/AndroidRuntime(14097): com.firebase.client.FirebaseException: Failed to bounce to type E/AndroidRuntime(14097): at com.firebase.client.DataSnapshot.getValue(DataSnapshot.java:213)

Looking into the dependency tree I get that Firebase is using Jackson mapper 1.9.7, so the annotation @JsonIgnoreProperties(ignoreUnknown = true") is not an option. Moreover, the object mapper is wrapped into this Firebase object so I can't configure the DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES property (DeserializationConfig.Feature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES for Jackson 1.9 and before).

Is there any way to set this property, either as a class-level annotation or configuring the mapper or any other mechanism whatsoever?

The best solution would be that Firebase 1.0.3 started using Jackson 2.0, but don't know if this is something they care about right now.

Note: I've already thought about excluding the transitive Jackson 1.9.7 dependency and adding Jackson 2.0 so that I can access to this ignoreUnknown feature, but I don't think it is a viable choice since I would be changing the mayor version.

Answer 1

For those who have moved over to Google's official version of Firebase (As of May 29, 2016), you can use @Exclude instead of @JsonIgnore or @JsonProperty. Here is the link to their document.

Example:

public class dataPacket{     public String data;     ...     @Exclude     public String getData(){return data;} }