Ok, paired up with a colleague at work and we tried two things, return a string (escapes strings in REST output - returns a big String.) not good. What worked is setting the response object to a and calling mapper.readValue(jsonFeed, Map.class), that returned the JSON in proper object notation.
@Value("${metadata.json.file}") //defined in application.context
private Resource metaJsonFileName;
public String getJsonFromFile(List<UnitUiItem> uiitems){
JsonNode root;
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
InputStream stream = metaJsonFileName.getInputStream();
root = mapper.readTree(stream);
JsonNode dataNode = root.get("data");
JsonNode optionDataNode = dataNode.get("storelocation");
((ObjectNode)optionDataNode).putArray("units");
for(UnitUiItem item : uiitems){
JsonNode unitNode = ((ObjectNode)optionDataNode).withArray("units").addObject();
((ObjectNode)unitNode).put("code",item.getCode());
((ObjectNode)unitNode).put("displayName",item.getDisplayName());
}
LOGGER.info("buildMetaJson exit");
return root.toString();
}
//calling method
String jsonFeed = getJsonFromFile();
ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
response.setData(mapper.readValue(jsonFeed, Map.class));
I have some code cleanup to do.. any cleaner ways of doing this?