Generating List<Something> from JSON with svenson

Often you’ll find yourself wanting to parse a JSON into a Java collection but want the values inside the collection to be of a specific type. Nothing easier than that.

import org.svenson.JSONParser;
…
// Getting a list containing your own type Something.
// Assume json to be a String containing the JSON dataset.
JSONParser parser = new JSONParser();
parser.addTypeHint("[]", Something.class);
List<Something> someThings = parser.parse(List.class, json);
// someThings will be a ArrayList instance by default. You can change
// that by changing the mappings for interfaces by calling
// org.svenson.JSONParser.setInterfaceMappings(Map<Class, Class>)

Parsing into a map is not much more complicated either

JSONParser jsonParser = new JSONParser();
jsonParser.addTypeHint(new RegExPathMatcher("\\.(f1|f2)"), Something.class);
Map<String,Object> someThings = jsonParser.parse(Map.class, json);

If we want to have our Something type for more than a single field, we need to setup a matcher. Here you see an example of a RegExPathMatcher that makes sure that both the keys “f1” and “f2” of the map we receive will be converted to Something, while all other fields are not.

If you want to convert all map properties to Something, the RegExPathMatcher would be like this

    … new RegExPathMatcher("\\..*") …

This would match every JSON path that starts with a property. If you don’t like RegularExpressions, or are on some kind of diet on them, you can also construct a more complex matcher tree from the compositable Matchers like this

JSONParser jsonParser = new JSONParser();
jsonParser.addTypeHint(new OrMatcher(
    new PrefixPathMatcher(".f1"),
    new PrefixPathMatcher(".f2")), Something.class);
Map<String,Object> someThings = jsonParser.parse(Map.class, json);

Update: Due to me fucking up both the Prefix-/Suffix- matchers as well as their tests, the last example will only really work with the current svenson trunk/future svenson 1.3.8