Stripe Java API - Cannot parse Event object from Webhook

Question

I upgraded to the latest Stripe API (2017-06-05) and noticed that test webhooks being sent to my server worked perfectly, but live ones did not. After looking into it, I noticed that the Event object contains the following in LIVE mode:

  ...
  "pending_webhooks": 1,
  "request": {
    "id": null,
    "idempotency_key": null
  },
  ...

And the following in TEST mode:

  ...
  "pending_webhooks": 1,
  "request": null
  ...

This results in the following error in LIVE mode:

Expected a string but was BEGIN_OBJECT at line 105 column 15 path $.request

Clearly, the error occurs because test webhooks can be "mistaken" as a null String instead of a null object, which is why tests do NOT throw an exception.

The current version of the Stripe client library (5.6.0) has the following code for the EventRequest.class de-serialization:

public EventRequest deserialize(JsonElement json, Type typeOfT, JsonDeserializationContext context)
    throws JsonParseException {
    Gson gson = new GsonBuilder()
        .setFieldNamingPolicy(FieldNamingPolicy.LOWER_CASE_WITH_UNDERSCORES)
        .create();

    // API versions 2017-05-25 and earlier render `request` as a string
    // instead of a JSON object
    if (json.isJsonPrimitive()) {
        EventRequest request = new EventRequest();
        request.setId(json.getAsString());
        return request;
    }
    else {
        return gson.fromJson(json, typeOfT);
    }
}

So, I'm really not sure of why this issue is happening or how to remedy this, since it is caused internally in the Stripe Java client library. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, but I ran into a similar problem. The JSON sent by Stripe has a number of properties that are serialized as IDs instead of objects. You need to use the GSON instance built into Stripe to decode it:

com.stripe.net.ApiResource.GSON.fromJson(payload, Event.class)

Where payload is the JSON string.