How to Parse JSON in Java Object using Jackson - Example Tutorial

Hello guys, if you are wondering how to parse JSON in Java then don't worry, there are many options. In the last article, I have shown you 3 ways to parse JSON in Java in this example, You will learn how to parse a  JSON String to Java and how to convert Java Object to JSON format using Jackson. JSON stands for JavaScript Object notation is a subset of JavaScript object syntax, which allows all JavaScript clients to process it without using any external library. Because of its compact size, compared to XML and platform independence nature makes JSON a favorite format for transferring data via HTTP. 

Though Java doesn't have any inbuilt support to parse JSON responses in the core library, Java developers are lucky to have a couple of good and feature-rich JSON processing libraries such as GSON, Jacksonand JSON-simple

Jackson is a high-performance, one of the fasted JSON parsing libraries, which also provides streaming capability. 

It has no external dependency and solely depends on JDK. It is also powerful and provides full binding support for common JDK classes as well as any Java Bean class, like Player in our case. It also provides data binding for Java Collection classes like Map as well Enum.




Jackson Library

The complete Jackson library consists of 6 jar files that are used for many diffident operations. In this example, we are going to need just one, mapper-asl.jar

If you want to install the full library to your project you can download and use jackson-all-*.jar which includes all the jars. You can download them from the Jackson Download Page.

Alternatively, If you are using Maven in your project (which you should) then you can add the following dependency in your pom.xml.

<dependency>
      <groupId>org.codehaus.jackson</groupId>
      <artifactId>jackson-all</artifactId>
      <version>1.9.11</version>
</dependency>



You need Default Constructor in Your Bean Class

When I first run my program, I get the following exception because  I had a parametric constructor in the Player class and did not bother to add a  no-argument default constructor :

org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException: No suitable constructor 
found for type [simple type, class Player]: can not instantiate 
from JSON object (need to add/enable type information?)
at [Source: player.json; line: 1, column: 2]
               at org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException
.from(JsonMappingException.java:163)
               at org.codehaus.jackson.map.deser.BeanDeserializer
.deserializeFromObjectUsingNonDefault(BeanDeserializer.java:746)
               at org.codehaus.jackson.map.deser.BeanDeserializer
.deserializeFromObject(BeanDeserializer.java:683)
               at org.codehaus.jackson.map.deser.BeanDeserializer
.deserialize(BeanDeserializer.java:580)
               at org.codehaus.jackson.map
.ObjectMapper._readMapAndClose(ObjectMapper.java:2732)
               at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ObjectMapper
.readValue(ObjectMapper.java:1817)
               at JSONParser.toJava(Testing.java:30)
               at JSONParser.main(Testing.java:17)

Once I added the default constructor on the Player class this error is gone. Probably this is another reason why you should have a default or no-arg constructor in the Java class.




How to parse JSON in Java [Example]

Here is our sample program to parse JSON String in Java. As I said, in this example, we will use Jackson, an open-source JSON parsing library with rich features. 

There are two static methods here, toJSON() which converts a Java instance to JSON, and fromJSON() method which reads a JSON file, parses it, and creates Java objects.

The key object here is ObjectMapper class from the Jackson library, which is used for converting JSON to Java and vice-versa.

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.Arrays;

import org.codehaus.jackson.JsonGenerationException;
import org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException;
import org.codehaus.jackson.map.ObjectMapper;

/**
 * Java Program to parse JSON String to Java object and converting 
 * a Java object to equivalent
 * JSON String.
 *
 * @author Javin Paul
 */
public class JSONParser {

    public static void main(String args[]) {
        toJSON();  // converting Java object to JSON String
        toJava();  // parsing JSON file to create Java object
    }

    /**
     * Method to parse JSON String into Java Object using Jackson Parser.
     *
     */
    public static void toJava() {
       
        // this is the key object to convert JSON to Java
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

        try {
            File json = new File("player.json");
            Player cricketer = mapper.readValue(json, Player.class);
            System.out.println("Java object created from JSON String :");
            System.out.println(cricketer);

        } catch (JsonGenerationException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        } catch (JsonMappingException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();

        }
    }

    /**
     * Java method to convert Java Object into JSON String with 
     * help of Jackson API.
     *
     */
    public static void toJSON() {
        Player kevin = new Player("Kevin", "Cricket", 32, 221, 
                      new int[]{33, 66, 78, 21, 9, 200});

        // our bridge from Java to JSON and vice versa
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

        try {
            File json = new File("player.json");
            mapper.writeValue(json, kevin);
            System.out.println("Java object converted to JSON String,
                                  written to file");
            System.out.println(mapper.writeValueAsString(kevin));

        } catch (JsonGenerationException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        } catch (JsonMappingException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();

        }
    }

}

/*
 * A simple Java values class with getters and setters. 
 * We will convert Player class instance into
 * JSON String and a JSON object to Player instance.
 */
class Player {

    private String name;
    private String sport;
    private int age;
    private int id;
    private int[] lastScores;

    public Player() {
        //just there, need by Jackson library
    }

    public Player(String name, String sport, int age, int id, 
                   int[] lastinnings) {
        this.name = name;
        this.sport = sport;
        this.age = age;
        this.id = id;
        lastScores = lastinnings;
    }

    public final String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public final String getSport() {
        return sport;
    }

    public final int getAge() {
        return age;
    }

    public final int getId() {
        return id;
    }

    public final int[] getLastScores() {
        return lastScores;
    }

    public final void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public final void setSport(String sport) {
        this.sport = sport;
    }

    public final void setAge(int age) {
        this.age = age;
    }

    public final void setId(int id) {
        this.id = id;
    }

    public final void setLastScores(int[] lastScores) {
        this.lastScores = lastScores;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return "Player [name=" + name + ", sport=" + sport + ", age="
               + age + ", id=" + id
                + ", recent scores=" + Arrays.toString(lastScores) + "]";
    }

}


Output:
Java object converted to JSON String, written to file
{"name":"Kevin","sport":"Cricket","age":32,"id":221,"lastScores":
[33,66,78,21,9,200]}
Java object created from JSON String :
Player [name=Kevin, sport=Cricket, age=32, id=221, 
recent scores=[33, 66, 78, 21, 9, 200]]


This will also create a file called player.json in your current or project directory.

How to Parse JSON to/from Java Object using Jackson Example



That's all about how to parse JSON String in Java and convert a Java object to JSON using Jackson API. Though there is a couple of more good open-source library available for JSON parsing and conversions like GSON and JSON-Simple Jackson is one of the best and feature-rich, its also tried and tested library in many places, which means you should be a little worried about any nasty bug while parsing your big JSON String.

If you like this tutorial and want to know more about how to work with JSON and Java, check out the following fantastic articles :
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  • How to parse JSON Array to Java array? (solution)
  • Top 5 Websites to learn Java For FREE (websites)
  • How to parse JSON with date fields in Java? (example)
  • How to convert JSON to Java Object? (example)
  • How to parse JSON using Gson? (tutorial)
  • How to solve UnrecognizedPropertyException in Jackson? (solution)
  • 10 Advanced Core Java Courses for Experienced Developers (courses)
  • How to convert JSON to HashMap in Java? (guide)
  • 10 Things Java developers should learn?  (article)
  • 5 JSON parsing libraries Java Developers Should Know (libraries)
  • 10 Online courses to learn JavaScript in depth (courses)
  • How to parse a JSON array in Java? (tutorial)
  • Top 5 Courses to become full-stack Java developer (courses)
  • How to ignore unknown properties while parsing JSON in Java? (tutorial)
  • 5 Courses to learn RESTful  API and Web services in Java? (courses)
  • 10 free courses to learn Java in-depth (free java courses)

And, if you are in doubt, always use Jackson to parse JSON in the Java program. Make sure you use the latest version of the Jackson library as well as newer versions always have some bug fixes and performance improvements. 

P.S. - If you want to learn more about the advanced Java libraries and concepts then I also suggest you join these Free Java Programming courses, which cover several advanced Java features like JSON, RESTFul Web Services, JAXB, JDBC, etc. 

6 comments:

  1. This tutorial uses Jackson 1 (packaged under org.codehaus.jackson), but for any new development it would be preferable to start with Jackson 2 (com.fasterxml.jackson). Core comes in 3 jars (jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-annotations).

    ReplyDelete
  2. String json = Boon.toJson(player);
    Player player = Boon.fromJson(json, Player.class);
    And it is the fastest, and it would not have given you an error for not having a no arg constructor.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is indeed the simplest way to convert JSON to Java or vice-versa.

      Delete
  3. What's your source on this: "Jackson in a high performance, one of the fasted JSON parsing library" in many benchmarks Gson outperformed JSON...

    ReplyDelete
  4. Very nice article and want to share json tool for testing and analyzing JSON data such as http://jsonformatter.org and http://codebeautify.org/jsonviewer

    ReplyDelete
  5. JavaBean demands that you have:
    - implemented Serializable (which is just declare one variable).
    - an empty constructor, that doesn't do anything. If you have other constructors, for convenience, they should only set attributes, not do any calculation. They do not transfer over with Serializable.
    - get:ers and set:ers for each attribute (or have public attributes, which isn't that nice).

    If you don't follow that, you don't have a proper JavaBean.

    ReplyDelete

Feel free to comment, ask questions if you have any doubt.