Infinite Recursion with Jackson JSON and Hibernate JPA issue

Question

When trying to convert a JPA object that has a bi-directional association into JSON, I keep getting

org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException: Infinite          


        

Answer 1

For me the best solution is to use @JsonView and create specific filters for each scenario. You could also use @JsonManagedReference and @JsonBackReference, however it is a hardcoded solution to only one situation, where the owner always references the owning side, and never the opposite. If you have another serialization scenario where you need to re-annotate the attribute differently, you will not be able to.

Problem

Lets use two classes, Company and Employee where you have a cyclic dependency between them:

public class Company {

    private Employee employee;

    public Company(Employee employee) {
        this.employee = employee;
    }

    public Employee getEmployee() {
        return employee;
    }
}

public class Employee {

    private Company company;

    public Company getCompany() {
        return company;
    }

    public void setCompany(Company company) {
        this.company = company;
    }
}

And the test class that tries to serialize using ObjectMapper (Spring Boot):

@SpringBootTest
@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@Transactional
public class CompanyTest {

    @Autowired
    public ObjectMapper mapper;

    @Test
    public void shouldSaveCompany() throws JsonProcessingException {
        Employee employee = new Employee();
        Company company = new Company(employee);
        employee.setCompany(company);

        String jsonCompany = mapper.writeValueAsString(company);
        System.out.println(jsonCompany);
        assertTrue(true);
    }
}

If you run this code, you'll get the:

org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException: Infinite recursion (StackOverflowError)

Solution Using `@JsonView`

@JsonView enables you to use filters and choose what fields should be included while serializing the objects. A filter is just a class reference used as a identifier. So let's first create the filters:

public class Filter {

    public static interface EmployeeData {};

    public static interface CompanyData extends EmployeeData {};

} 

Remember, the filters are dummy classes, just used for specifying the fields with the @JsonView annotation, so you can create as many as you want and need. Let's see it in action, but first we need to annotate our Company class:

public class Company {

    @JsonView(Filter.CompanyData.class)
    private Employee employee;

    public Company(Employee employee) {
        this.employee = employee;
    }

    public Employee getEmployee() {
        return employee;
    }
}

and change the Test in order for the serializer to use the View:

@SpringBootTest
@RunWith(SpringRunner.class)
@Transactional
public class CompanyTest {

    @Autowired
    public ObjectMapper mapper;

    @Test
    public void shouldSaveCompany() throws JsonProcessingException {
        Employee employee = new Employee();
        Company company = new Company(employee);
        employee.setCompany(company);

        ObjectWriter writter = mapper.writerWithView(Filter.CompanyData.class);
        String jsonCompany = writter.writeValueAsString(company);

        System.out.println(jsonCompany);
        assertTrue(true);
    }
}

Now if you run this code, the Infinite Recursion problem is solved, because you have explicitly said that you just want to serialize the attributes that were annotated with @JsonView(Filter.CompanyData.class).

When it reaches the back reference for company in the Employee, it checks that it's not annotated and ignore the serialization. You also have a powerful and flexible solution to choose which data you want to send through your REST APIs.

With Spring you can annotate your REST Controllers methods with the desired @JsonView filter and the serialization is applied transparently to the returning object.

Here are the imports used in case you need to check:

import static org.junit.Assert.assertTrue;

import javax.transaction.Transactional;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.junit.runner.RunWith;
import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.test.context.SpringBootTest;
import org.springframework.test.context.junit4.SpringRunner;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonProcessingException;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectWriter;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonView;