Jackson JSON not serializing Joda DateTime correctly

Question

I have a Joda DateTime in an Order class:

public class Order {
    private DateTime creationTime;
    ...
}

I have initialized my mapper as follows:

mapper.configure(
        SerializationConfig.Feature.WRITE_DATES_AS_TIMESTAMPS, false);

When I serialize this class, I expect to see creationTime serialized in the ISO-8601 format as follows

{
  "creationTime" : "2011-01-01T09:00:00.000-04:00"
}

This is working perfectly fine in my unit test. However, in my web application, the exact same code is serializing all the DateTime fields:

{
  "creationTime" : {
    "year" : 2011,
    "dayOfMonth" : 17,
    "dayOfWeek" : 7,
    "era" : 1,
    "dayOfYear" : 107,
    "weekOfWeekyear" : 15,
    "weekyear" : 2011,
    "monthOfYear" : 4,
    "yearOfEra" : 2011,
    "yearOfCentury" : 11,
    "centuryOfEra" : 20,
    "millisOfSecond" : 590,
    "millisOfDay" : 40311590,
    "secondOfMinute" : 51,
    "secondOfDay" : 40311,
    "minuteOfHour" : 11,
    "minuteOfDay" : 671,
    "hourOfDay" : 11,
    "millis" : 1303053111590,
    "zone" : {
      "fixed" : false,
      "uncachedZone" : {
        "cachable" : true,
        "fixed" : false,
        "id" : "America/New_York"
      },
      "id" : "America/New_York"
    },
    "chronology" : {
      "zone" : {
        "fixed" : false,
        "uncachedZone" : {
          "cachable" : true,
          "fixed" : false,
          "id" : "America/New_York"
        },
        "id" : "America/New_York"
      }
    }
}

What am I missing? I am including jackson-core-asl-1.7.6.jar and jackson-mapper-asl-1.7.6.jar in my classpath in both cases.

In some online examples I saw an annotation on DateTime. I don't know if this is needed, but I tried it nevertheness. See below:

public class Order {
    @JsonSerialize(using=DateTimeSerializer.class)
    private DateTime creationTime;
    ...
}

This seems to make no difference.

Thanks.

P.S. Does anyone know if the Jackson mailing list is working? I posted this question on the user mailing list, but it doesn't show in the archives. The last post in the archives is dated 24 June 2010.

Answer 1

This seemed to do the trick for me: How to serialize Joda DateTime with Jackson JSON processer?

Basically, the idea was to create a class that extends org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonSerializer with a overried serialize method:

public void serialize(DateTime value, JsonGenerator gen, SerializerProvider arg2) throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
    gen.writeString(formatter.print(value));
}

Then just use that custom serializer in place of DateTimeSerializer.