Jackson serialize nested attribute with same name

Question

Currently, I have a JSON response of the following type.

{
   "user":{
      "user":{
         "name":"Demo",
         "age":25,
         "eail":"demo@abc.com"
      },
      "address":{
         "country":"NZ"
      }
   }
}

I want to map my custom class to nested user attributes.

@Data
public class Demo{
      @JsonProperty("user")
      private User user;
      private Address address;
}

But when I am trying to get the attribute, it is always sending null value. I think it is maping to first occurance of "user" in line no 2.

How can I map it to correct user attribute in line no 3.

Answer 1

Mapping starts from the root of JSON so the correct class definition for this JSON will be this

public class Demo {
    @JsonProperty("user")
    private DemoUser user;
}

public class DemoUser {
    @JsonProperty("user")
    private User user;

    @JsonProperty("address")
    private Address address;
}

If you want to keep the class as it is and only want to use the inner 'user', you can do it using JsonNode like this

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
JsonNode node = mapper.readValue(jsonString, JsonNode.class);
Demo demo = mapper.readValue(node.at("/user").toString(), Demo.class);

The at() method accepts the JSON path expression which is the path to a particular node in the JSON.

Here, "/user" means it will find the node user from the root of JSON and will return it.

Similarly,

node.at("/user/user").toString();

will give you

{
  "name":"Demo",
  "age":25,
  "eail":"demo@abc.com"
}