In one of my projects, I had a situation where, I had to invoke a web-service which returned JSON response. JSON response has to be parsed, information has to be extracted from it and shown to the user.
The JSON response returned by the web-service was pretty big, with lots of fields, objects, lists and lists of objects. In sort, the JSON response was pretty complex, it would have been a lot of work to extract information out of it, construct domain objects and then use it to show the information on the GUI.
Android provides a package org.json which has class like JSONObject, JSONArray, etc which help us parse the JSON responses. I could have used those class and parsed the JSON response, extracted the information out of it, converted that into domain objects and used them to show it on the GUI. But I am a lazy developer! I am always in an hunt for ways to reduce my work!
I was in no mood to write the such a lot of code just to parse the JSON response. Over and above it, there are multiple problems with writing such code
- Quite some code just to parse the JSON response
- Code has to be tested very well. We have to make sure that it works in all situations.
- This approach is error prone. For example, if we decide to change the JSON keys, a lot of code have to be updated and there is no compile time check to find out errors if any while updating the keys.
The perfect library for the task is Gson. Gson is an opensource project that helps us convert JSON to JavaBeans or JavaBeans to JSON using one line of code!
This effectively means we could convert the JSON response to our model Objects with one line of code. Isn't it awesome!
How do they do it?
An example explains things much faster. So lets not waste any time and head straight to see Gson in action.
Lets say that the JSON response returned by the service looked like
As we can see, the web services returns us the searched Address and Points of Interest (POI) around the searched address in the JSON response.
We want to convert this JSON response into the POIResponse Java domain object. Lets look at how the POIResponse class looks like
The model class are pretty standard. They just have fields with the same name as the keys in the JSON response. Notice that we do have complex objects like Address and POI and list of POI in POIResponse class.
For Gson to work only one condition has to meet and that is, the name of fields in the model class should be same as the JSON keys. This is based on the convention over configuration principal.
Also notice that we do not have getters and setters in our domain classes. Gson uses reflection to set the values directly into the fields. Gson find private fields as well.
Lets look at the code to convert the JSON response into model Java object.
Thats all we need to do to convert JSON response into POIResponse object! As promised its just one line of code.
Gson has excellent support for Generics. Notice that, we did not have to caste the return type of fromJson method to POIResponse.
Gson can convert POIResponse to JSON with the same ease.
The string reference json holds the JSON representation of the poiResponse instance.
Gson is an excellent lightweight library when it comes to working with JSON.
In the next post I will show how Gson provides enough hooks to provide custom serializers and deserializers.
Till then, stay tuned!
