JSON Object representation

Question

I am new to JSON. so please help me....

I am trying to write a Rest service that returns a Person object as follows:

PersonJSONAdapter implements JsonSerializer<Person>, JsonDeserializer<Person>
{
    public JsonElement serialize(final Person src, final Type typeOfSrc, final      JsonSerializationContext context)
    {
        if (src == null)
            return null;

        final JsonObject retVal = new JsonObject();

        retVal.addProperty("firstname", src.getFirstname());
        retVal.addProperty("lastname", src.getLastname());

        return retVal;
}

so with this the output of the JSON looks like: { "firstname" : "XXX", "lastname" : "YYY" }

How can I make this one look like “Person” { “firstname”: “XXX”, "lastname":"YYY" }

Thanks for looking...

Answer 1

That's not valid JSON. JSON is only a data representation and has no knowledge of meta data such as type information.

The closest you can get is by explicitly adding the type as an extra property, such as:

{ "@type":"Person", "firstname":"XXX", "lastname":"YYY" }

This means however that you'll have to select the right class when you deserialize it. You might want to check out some libraries, but I think they either require you to specify the class yourself or to add custom annotations to serializable classes.