Marshalling two similar json fields to the same java field

Question

I have a sample dummy JSON response that looks like :

    {
        "id": 1,
        "teacher_name": "Foo",
        "teacher_address": "123 Main St.",
        "teacher_phone_num": 1234567891,
        "student_name": "Bar",
        "student_address": "546 Main St.",
        "student_phone_num": 9184248576
    }

The above is a silly example, but it helps illustrate the issue I am having trying to de-serialize the above into a Java class called "Employee" using Jackson:

public class Employee {
    String name;
    String address;
    String phoneNumber;
}

The issue is that the JSON has two different prepends so I cannot annotate each field in Employee and have the object mapper map teacher_name and student_name to the name field in an Employee object. Is there a way in Jackson to specify two differently named nodes to map to the same Java field?

Answer 1

So in my example, I should end up with two Employee objects (I am guaranteed to have one pair per response)

It is not possible with Jackson. It is designed to map one-to-one: one json object to one java object. But you want to end up with two java objects from one json.

I would recommend you to go with strait forward way by implementing some processing level that will consume Response and map it to two Employee objects.