Configure Jackson to ignore everything but class fields/members

Question

I have a Spring Boot 2.3.2.RELEASE WebFlux application. I have some JPA entities that are returned as part of the RESTful API responses.

The problem is that as I add methods (that exposes behavior) to these JPA entities, those return types/values are also being sent back, and I would like to avoid that.

Basically, what I'm looking for is to configure Jackson in such a way to only (de)serialize the class fields/members and anything annotated with @JsonProperty . I can also go with the approach of ignoring everything by default, and placing @JsonProperty on the members that I want to (de)serialize.

Note also:

• Those classes have no setters, and usually there is no constructor (except for the required no-arguments one). They used a builder most of the times.

• I know I can just annotate those methods with @JsonIgnore , but there will be a lot of those, so I wonder if there is another solution that includes only the fields/members (of the classes) and anything annotated with @JsonProperty .

Answer 1

The possibilities depend on the actual code you have but you could check out visibility . You could configure your ObjectMapper like:

om.setVisibility(PropertyAccessor.FIELD, JsonAutoDetect.Visibility.ANY);
om.setVisibility(PropertyAccessor.GETTER, JsonAutoDetect.Visibility.NONE);

Then with class like below serialization would be done as stated in comments:

public static class TestClass {
    @Getter // getter is generated but ignored
            // because visibility for GETTER is NONE
    // still serialized because visibility for FIELD is ANY
    private String fieldThatShouldBeSerialized = "It is OK to serialize me :)";
    // not serialized because visibility for GETTER is NONE
    public String getMethodThatShouldNotBeSerialized() {
        return "It is NOT OK to serialize me :(";
    }
    @JsonProperty // serialized because explicitly asked (not auto)
    public String methodThatShouldBeSerialized() {
        return "It is OK to serialize me also :)";
    }
    @JsonProperty // serialized because explicitly asked (not auto)
                  // even it is a "getter"
    public String getAnotherMethodThatShouldBeSerialized() {
        return "It is OK to serialize me also :)";
    }

}