json - Accessing Jackson Object Mapper in RestEasy

Question

I've been asked to beautify default Jackson JSON coming out of a RestEasy endpoint. I did some research on Jackson and wrote some standalone code to be able to suppress nulls, customize data formats etc. Now the challenge is injecting this code in RestEasy's JSON serialization.

Judging from the forum posts this is trivial in Spring, however doesn't seem to be the case in RestEasy. I wrote a ContextResolver and configured as resteasy.provider in context params in web.xml (on Tomcat) but that prevents the webapp from loading on Tomcat.

Now I'm trying to extend javax.ws.rs.core.Application and provide a ContextResolver but making no progress. Is this straight forward, has anyone done this? Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I found a nicer way of modifying the Jackson SerializationConfig - you can intercept the ObjectMapper creation by using a JAX-RS ContextResolver.

@Provider
@Produces(Array(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON))
class JacksonConfig extends ContextResolver[ObjectMapper] {

  val mapper = new ObjectMapper()
  mapper.getSerializationConfig.setSerializationInclusion(Inclusion.NON_NULL)

  def getContext(objectType: Class[_]) = mapper
}

You will need to register with RESTEasy in one of the following ways:

• Return it as a class or instance from a javax.ws.rs.core.Application implementation
• List it as a provider with resteasy.providers
• Let RESTEasy automatically scan for it within your WAR file. See Configuration Guide
• Manually add it via ResteasyProviderFactory.getInstance().registerProvider(Class) or registerProviderInstance(Object)

Reference: RESTEasy docs

Reference: Nicklas Karlsson on the JBoss forums

Please note that this works with RESTEasy 2.3.2 which ships as a module in JBoss 7.1.1.Final, but does not appear to work with RESTEasy 3.0-beta5.