JsonMappingException when serializing avro generated object to json

Question

I used avro-tools to generate java classes from avsc files, using:

java.exe -jar avro-tools-1.7.7.jar compile -string schema myfile.avsc 

Then I tried to serialize such objects to json by ObjectMapper, but always got a JsonMappingException saying "not an enum" or "not a union". In my test I create the generated object using it's builder or constructor. I got such exceptions for objects of different classes...

Sample Code:

ObjectMapper serializer = new ObjectMapper(); // com.fasterxml.jackson.databind
serializer.register(new JtsModule()); // com.bedatadriven.jackson.datatype.jts
...
return serializer.writeValueAsBytes(avroConvertedObject); // => JsonMappingException

I also tried many configurations using: serializer.configure(...) but still failed. Versions: Java 1.8, jackson-datatype-jts 2.3, jackson-core 2.6.5, jackson-databind 2.6.5, jackson-annotations 2.6.5

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Answer 1

After finding the code example at https://www.programcreek.com/java-api-examples/?api=org.apache.avro.io.JsonEncoder I wrote a method that should convert any given Avro object (they extend GenericRecord) to a Json String. Code:

import org.apache.avro.generic.GenericDatumWriter;
import org.apache.avro.generic.GenericRecord;
import org.apache.avro.io.DatumWriter;
import org.apache.avro.io.EncoderFactory;
import org.apache.avro.io.JsonEncoder;

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.OutputStream;

// ... Class header etc. ...

public static <T extends GenericRecord> String convertToJsonString(T event) throws IOException {

    String jsonstring = "";

    try {
        DatumWriter<T> writer = new GenericDatumWriter<T>(event.getSchema());
        OutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        JsonEncoder encoder = EncoderFactory.get().jsonEncoder(event.getSchema(), out);
        writer.write(event, encoder);
        encoder.flush();
        jsonstring = out.toString();
    } catch (IOException e) {
        log.error("IOException occurred.", e);
        throw e;
    }

    return jsonstring;
}