GSON error in Play framework 1.2.5

Question

The bug seems to be a recursion bug, that Company asks for Worksheets which asks for Company again, which .... you get the drift. I have searched the internet and stack overflow for this, I found out why the error happens, but the solution is always write your own parser or use flexjson or some other. I just want to know if there is a solution to this, there has to be since play is quite popular and surely people are fetching Posts and comments in one operation, or aren't they ?

There has to be a solution to this, without swapping out json parsers or writing your own.

Company.java

package models;

import java.util.*;
import javax.persistence.*;

import play.db.jpa.*;

@Entity
public class Company extends Model {
    public String name;
    public String address;
    public String city;
    public String zipcode;
    public String country;
    public String phonenumber;
    public String website;
    public String footer;
    public String maincontactperson;
    public String email;
    public String password;
    public Blob logo;
    @OneToMany(mappedBy = "company", cascade = CascadeType.ALL, orphanRemoval = true, fetch=FetchType.EAGER)
    public List<Worksheet> worksheets;


    }

}

and

Worksheet.java

package models;

import java.util.*;
import javax.persistence.*;

import play.db.jpa.*;

@Entity
public class Worksheet extends Model {
    public String contactname;
    public String name;
    public String address;
    public String phonenumber;
    public String city;
    public String email;
    public String partnumber;
    @Lob
    public String partdescription;
    public String password;
    public Date due_date;
    public Date in_date;
    @Lob
    public String notes;
    @ManyToOne(cascade=CascadeType.ALL)
    public Company company;
...
}

In my controller, I just run this :

List<Company> companies = Company.FindAll();
renderJSON(companies);

This works if there are no worksheets, but once there is a worksheet, it crashes with a mile long error message. Here is the top of it :

00:31:02,623 ERROR ~ 

@6cbn7gi1o
Internal Server Error (500) for request POST /companies/login

Execution exception
InvocationTargetException occured : null

play.exceptions.JavaExecutionException
    at play.mvc.ActionInvoker.invoke(ActionInvoker.java:239)
    at Invocation.HTTP Request(Play!)
Caused by: java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException
    at play.mvc.ActionInvoker.invokeWithContinuation(ActionInvoker.java:557)
    at play.mvc.ActionInvoker.invoke(ActionInvoker.java:508)
    at play.mvc.ActionInvoker.invokeControllerMethod(ActionInvoker.java:484)
    at play.mvc.ActionInvoker.invokeControllerMethod(ActionInvoker.java:479)
    at play.mvc.ActionInvoker.invoke(ActionInvoker.java:161)
    ... 1 more
Caused by: java.lang.StackOverflowError
    at java.util.Date.getTimeImpl(Date.java:870)
    at java.util.Date.getTime(Date.java:866)
    at java.sql.Timestamp.getTime(Timestamp.java:126)
    at java.util.Calendar.setTime(Calendar.java:1076)
    at java.text.SimpleDateFormat.format(SimpleDateFormat.java:875)
    at java.text.SimpleDateFormat.format(SimpleDateFormat.java:868)
    at java.text.DateFormat.format(DateFormat.java:316)
    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.DateTypeAdapter.write(DateTypeAdapter.java:90)
    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.DateTypeAdapter.write(DateTypeAdapter.java:41)
    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.TypeAdapters$22$1.write(TypeAdapters.java:522)
    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.TypeAdapters$22$1.write(TypeAdapters.java:515)
....

    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.ReflectiveTypeAdapterFactory$1.write(ReflectiveTypeAdapterFactory.java:89)
    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.ReflectiveTypeAdapterFactory$Adapter.write(ReflectiveTypeAdapterFactory.java:195)
    at com.google.gson.Gson$FutureTypeAdapter.write(Gson.java:879)
    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.TypeAdapterRuntimeTypeWrapper.write(TypeAdapterRuntimeTypeWrapper.java:68)
    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.ReflectiveTypeAdapterFactory$1.write(ReflectiveTypeAdapterFactory.java:89)
    at com.google.gson.internal.bind.ReflectiveTypeAdapterFactory$Adapter.write(ReflectiveTypeAdapterFactory.java:195)

Answer 1

IMHO this isn't a bug, you have a recursion in your model and the framework can't really know automatically how it should serialize the model.

I usually solve this with the @Expose annotation. Add it to all the members you want to show up in your serialized JSON and create a helper method that does something like this:

    Gson gson = new GsonBuilder().excludeFieldsWithoutExposeAnnotation().create();
    String json = gson.toJson(your_model_instance);

Optionally you can also implement the JsonSerializer interface as suggested in the comment.

Answer 2

In another question , I found a link to this class , which seems to solve the circular reference problem nicely (and without modification of the model classes).

See the approved answer to the linked question for an example.