Gson overflows with StackOverflow exception on “$Types.resolve”

Question

I have an ArrayList and an ArrayList and the gson works perfectly fine when retrieving the custom object ArrayList but causes a stackOverflow exception when retrieving the LinearLayout ArrayList.

Code:

public Semester(JSONObject json) throws JSONException {

coursesAsString = json.getString(JSON_COURSES);
Type coursesType = new TypeToken<ArrayList<Course>>(){}.
courses = gson.fromJson(coursesAsString, // <--- THIS PART WORKS FINE

courseLayoutArrayAsString = json.getString(JSON_COURSELAYOUTARRAY);
Type courseLayoutArrayType = new TypeToken<ArrayList<LinearLayout>>(){}.getType();
courseLayoutArray = gson.fromJson(courseLayoutArrayAsString, courseLayoutArrayType); // <---- this line
//is where the problem lies. For some reason 
//"gson.fromJson(courseLayoutArrayAsString, courseLayoutArrayType)" causes a stackOverflow exception.

}

Here is the exception:

java.lang.StackOverflowError
        at com.google.gson.internal.$Gson$Types.resolve($Gson$Types.java:375)
        at com.google.gson.internal.$Gson$Types.resolve($Gson$Types.java:380)
        at com.google.gson.internal.$Gson$Types.resolve($Gson$Types.java:375)
        at com.google.gson.internal.$Gson$Types.resolve($Gson$Types.java:380)

and it keeps going on like this for a long time.

Answer 1

You are trying to serialize LinearLayouts? That's very bad practice.

You should serialize the data you need in those LinearLayouts and recreate the LinearLayout when the data is deserialized.

Answer 2

In data structure serializers there are two major causes of stack overflows. 1) simple depth recursion limits (too many objects deep) or 2) a infinite self-referencing loop.