Spring RestTemplate - Specifying Jackson View

Question

I have a rest client class which is responsible for making calls to a rest service using a single Spring RestTemplate bean to do the HTTP exchanges. This includes serialization of MyObject.java via MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter.java.

When creating (POST) a MyObject I send 5 fields.

When updating (PUT) a MyObject I must only send 3 (the mutable fields).

I want a single DTO, MyObject, that serializes differently under different circumstances: POST vs PUT. Step in Jackson Views which solve this problems perfectly.

My problem is that ObjectMapper is hidden away in the RestTemplate messageConverters which makes it hard to add context at REST exchange time as to which View I want the ObjectMapper to use when serializing.

Is there any way to achieve this or do I need 2 distinct RestTemplates, one configured with an Object mapper for creation and one for updating. This seems like a lot of duplication.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can configure ObjectMapper or the DTO itself to ignore nulls during serialization. Then only set the fields you want to pass in your DTO.