As mentioned in my previous post, Gson is an excellent lightweight opensource library to do JSON manipulations. I have used this library on the Android platform, it works great!
We have seen that, converting JSON to Java model objects and Java model Objects to JSON is pretty straight forward with Gson.
In this post lets look at the various hooks that Gson provides to deal with not so straight forward scenarios.
Lets take an example. Lets say you want to convert the JSON string value "08:00" into Java model Time object. A very valid scenario right?
Basically, we need to serialize and deserialize the Time object in a special way. Gson provides a way in which we can hookup our own serializer and deserializer for a given type. This serializer and deserializer will be invoked to convert the Java model object into JSON String and JSON string into Java model object.
The approach taken by Gson to do this task is pretty natural and easy to follow. Great job guys!
Lets look at the code to put things in perspective.
The Time class has two fields one to represent the hour and other represents the minute of the day. Let's say that, we want the JSON representation of Time objects to be of in the format "HH:MM". Let's first look at the code to convert Java model Time object into JSON
Gson provides an interface called JsonSerializer. We can provide an implementation of JsonSerializer to serialize the Time object in the way we want. The code to do this would look like
Ok so the serializer does not look very complex. How do we tell Gson to use TimeSerializer when it serializes the Time object?
Turns out, Gson providers a class called GsonBuilder. This class can be used to register custom serializers and deserializers with Gson. GsonBuilder class has the responsibility to construct an instance of Gson with registered serializers and deserializers. Let's look at the code
Does not look too difficult right?
Serialization done, let's look at deserialization. Any guesses?
I am sure you got it right. Gson provider an interface called JsonDeserializer. We have implement this interface to provide a custom deserializer for the Time Java model class. Let's look at the deserializer code.
The code of deserializer looks pretty simple. The code to integrate the deserializer is exactly the same as the code to integrate the serializer.
Thats all folks! Gson is a really good framework to manipulate JSON.
We have effectively used it in Android projects. If you have to do JSON manipulation in your project, I would suggest to have a look at Gson for sure!
