Spring 3.2 and Jackson 2: add custom object mapper

Question

I'm developing a REST webservice in spring MVC. I need to change how jackson 2 serialize mongodb objectids. I'm not sure of what to do because I found partial documentation for jackson 2, what I did is to create a custom serializer:

public class ObjectIdSerializer extends JsonSerializer<ObjectId> {


    @Override
    public void serialize(ObjectId value, JsonGenerator jsonGen,
            SerializerProvider provider) throws IOException,
            JsonProcessingException {
        jsonGen.writeString(value.toString());
    }
}

Create a ObjectMapper

public class CustomObjectMapper extends ObjectMapper {

    public CustomObjectMapper() {
        SimpleModule module = new SimpleModule("ObjectIdmodule");
        module.addSerializer(ObjectId.class, new ObjectIdSerializer());
        this.registerModule(module);
    }

}

and then register the mapper

<mvc:annotation-driven>
    <mvc:message-converters register-defaults="true">
        <bean
            class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter">
            <property name="objectMapper">
                <bean class="my.package.CustomObjectMapper"></bean>
            </property>
        </bean>
    </mvc:message-converters>
</mvc:annotation-driven>

My CustomConverter is never called. I think the CustomObjectMapper definition is wrong,I adapted it from some code for jackson 1.x

In my controllers I'm using @ResponseBody. Where am I doing wrong? Thanks

Answer 1

You should annotate corresponding model field with @JsonSerialize annontation. In your case it may be:

public class MyMongoModel{
   @JsonSerialize(using=ObjectIdSerializer.class)
   private ObjectId id;
}

But in my opinion, it should better don't use entity models as VOs. Better way is to have different models and map between them. You can find my example project here (I used date serialization with Spring 3 and Jackson 2 as example).