Does jackson deserialize a list to ArrayList in default?

Question

I run the following code snippet:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonProcessingException;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.type.TypeReference;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.LinkedList;
import java.util.List;

public class JsonMapper {
    public static final ObjectMapper OBJECT_MAPPER = new ObjectMapper();

    public static <T> String toJson(final T object) throws JsonProcessingException {
        return OBJECT_MAPPER.writeValueAsString(object);
    }

    public static <T> T fromJson(final String json, final Class<T> clazz) throws IOException {
        return OBJECT_MAPPER.readValue(json, clazz);
    }

    public static <T> T fromJson(final String json, final TypeReference<T> type) throws IOException {
        return OBJECT_MAPPER.readValue(json, type);
    }
    public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException {
        String json = "[1,2,3]";
        // TEST1: initialize TypeReference with type ArrayList
        List<Integer> expected = JsonMapper.fromJson(json, new TypeReference<ArrayList<Integer>>(){});
        System.out.println(expected.getClass().getName());
        // TEST2: initialize TypeReference with type List
        expected = JsonMapper.fromJson(json, new TypeReference<List<Integer>>(){});
        System.out.println(expected.getClass().getName());
        // TEST3: initialize TypeReference with type LinkedList
        expected = JsonMapper.fromJson(json, new TypeReference<LinkedList<Integer>>(){});
        System.out.println(expected.getClass().getName());

    }
}

the output is:

java.util.ArrayList
java.util.ArrayList
java.util.LinkedList

The type of variable expected is ArrayList when I initialize TypeReference with type ArrayList or List , but it becomes LinkedList if I initialize TypeReference with type LinkedList . So, does jackson deserialize a string list to ArrayList in default?

Answer 1

Yes, jackson deserialize a string list to ArrayList in default. The code is in com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.impl.CreatorCollector class:

    @Override
    public Object createUsingDefault(DeserializationContext ctxt) throws IOException {
        switch (_type) {
        case TYPE_COLLECTION: return new ArrayList<Object>();
        case TYPE_MAP: return new LinkedHashMap<String,Object>();
        case TYPE_HASH_MAP: return new HashMap<String,Object>();
        }
        throw new IllegalStateException("Unknown type "+_type);
    }