Jackson read json in generic List

Question

I'm using Jackson in order to read json messages. One of the values that I' trying to parse is a List and another value contains the type of the data in the list. This is the structure i 've created in java.

public class Message<T> {    private Timestamp time;    private RestAction action;    private String type;    private List<T> data; } 

Through Class.forName(); I can get the class which represents the data in the list. The question is how can I read the List.

Answer 1

Something which is much shorter:

mapper.readValue(jsonString, new TypeReference<List<EntryType>>() {}); 

Where EntryType is a reference to type you would like to hold within collection. It might be any Java class. For example to read JSON representation such as ["a", "b", "c"] second argument to mapper should be new TypeReference<List<String>>() {}