How to conditionally ignore properties with a Jackson AnnotationIntrospector

Question

I want to create an annotation to make Jackson ignore the annotated fields unless a certain tracing level is set:

public class A {
    @IgnoreLevel(\"Debug\"         


        

Answer 1

If you want to sub-class JacksonAnnotationIntrospector, you just need to override hasIgnoreMarker, something like:

@Override
public boolean hasIgnoreMarker(AnnotatedMember m) {
  IgnoreLevel lvl = m.findAnnotation(IgnoreLevel.class);
  // use whatever logic necessary
  if (level.value().equals("Debug")) return true;
  return super.hasIgnoreMarker();
}

but note that annotation introspection only occurs once per class so you can not dynamically change the criteria you use.

For more dynamic filtering you may want to rather use JSON Filter functionality, see for example: http://www.cowtowncoder.com/blog/archives/2011/09/entry_461.html