Parsing JSON in Spring MVC using Jackson JSON

Question

Ok, so I\'ve been looking at this for a little while now and am no further on. I\'ve got a Spring MVC servlet that I need to accept JSON from a JavaScript front end web app

Answer 1

The whole point of using a mapping technology like Jackson is that you can use Objects (you don't have to parse the JSON yourself).

Define a Java class that resembles the JSON you will be expecting.

e.g. this JSON:

{
"foo" : ["abc","one","two","three"],
"bar" : "true",
"baz" : "1"
}

could be mapped to this class:

public class Fizzle{
    private List<String> foo;
    private boolean bar;
    private int baz;
    // getters and setters omitted
}

Now if you have a Controller method like this:

@RequestMapping("somepath")
@ResponseBody
public Fozzle doSomeThing(@RequestBody Fizzle input){
    return new Fozzle(input);
}

and you pass in the JSON from above, Jackson will automatically create a Fizzle object for you, and it will serialize a JSON view of the returned Object out to the response with mime type application/json.

For a full working example see this previous answer of mine.

Answer 2

I'm using json lib from http://json-lib.sourceforge.net/
json-lib-2.1-jdk15.jar

import net.sf.json.JSONObject;
...

public void send()
{
    //put attributes
    Map m = New HashMap();
    m.put("send_to","my@admin.lan");
    m.put("email_subject","this is a test email");
    m.put("email_content","test email content");

    //generate JSON Object
    JSONObject json = JSONObject.fromObject(content);
    String message = json.toString();
    ...
}

public void receive(String jsonMessage)
{
    //parse attributes
    JSONObject json = JSONObject.fromObject(jsonMessage);
    String to = (String) json.get("send_to");
    String title = (String) json.get("email_subject");
    String content = (String) json.get("email_content");
    ...
}

More samples here http://json-lib.sourceforge.net/usage.html