Spring MVC mapping view for Google-GSON?

Question

Does anyone know if there is a Spring MVC mapping view for Gson? I'm looking for something similar to org.springframework.web.servlet.view.json.MappingJacksonJsonView.

Ideally it would take my ModelMap and render it as JSON, respecting my renderedAttributes set in the ContentNegotiatingViewResolver declaration

We plan to use Gson extensively in the application as it seems safer and better than Jackson. That said, we're getting hung up by the need to have two different JSON libraries in order to do native JSON views.

Thanks in advance!

[cross-posted to Spring forums]

Answer 1

aweigold got me most of the way there, but to concretely outline a solution for Spring 3.1 Java based configuration, here's what I did.

Grab GsonHttpMessageConverter.java from the spring-android-rest-template project.

Register your GsonHttpMessageConverter with the message converters in your MVC config.

@EnableWebMvc
public class WebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
  @Override
  public void configureMessageConverters(List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters) {
    converters.add(new GsonHttpMessageConverter());
  }
}

The Spring docs outline this process, but aren't crystal clear. In order to get this to work properly, I had to extend WebMvcConfigurerAdapter, and then override configureMesageConverters. After doing this, you should be able to do the following in your controller method:

@Controller
public class AppController {
  @RequestMapping(value = "messages", produces = MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE)
  public List<Message> getMessages() {
    // .. Get list of messages
    return messages;
  }
}

And voila! JSON output.