Retrofit JSON deserializing object's $ref reference to its original copy

Question

I am using Microsoft.Net with Breeze for APIs and the results I get using Retrofit have nested repeated same objects. For example EmployeeJob has Customer navigation property so the APIs result looks like this

 {
   Id:1,
   "Customer_Id": 39,
    "Customer": {
        "$id": "2",
        "$type": "Wit.Trade.Entities.Customer, Wit.Trade",
        "CourtesyTitle": "Mr",
        "FirstName": "Ahmad"
    }
}
{
  Id:2
  "Customer_Id": 39,
    "Customer": {
        "$ref": "2" //here same customer Ahmad
    },
}

Now the Java List I get of these EmployeeJobs has only Customer in the first record and others have nothing. How can I map the $ref:"2" to its original value instead of this $ref.

I don't want my server APIs to send the complete objects for network and performance reasons, that's why I want to deserialize these $refs on client side just like Angularjs $resource service does for us.

Answer 1

Currently I have worked arround manually for the $ref solution like this

//========== $ref manual solution for employee jobs' customers
            List<Customer> completedCustomers = new ArrayList<>();
            for (EmployeeJob empJob : empJobs) {
                if (empJob.Customer != null && empJob.Customer.Id == null && empJob .Customer.$ref != null) {
                    for (Customer comCus : completedCustomers) {
                        if (comCus.$id.equalsIgnoreCase(empJob.Customer.$ref))
                            empJob.Customer = comCus;
                    }
                } else
                    completedCustomers.add(empJob.Customer);
            }

Now empJobs has the $refs replaced with their corresponding Customers.