Using Jackson ObjectMapper to serialize the subclass name into JSON, not the superclass

Question

In the following Jackson/Java code that serializes objects into JSON, I am getting this:

{\"animal\":{\"x\":\"x\"}}

However, what I actually wa

Answer 1

As per this announement, Jackson 1.5 implements full polymorphic type handling, and trunk now has that code integrated.

There are two simple ways to make this work:

• Add @JsonTypeInfo annotation in supertype (Animal here), OR
• Configure object mapper by calling ObjectMapper.enableDefaultTyping() (but if so, Animal needs to be abstract type)