Tuesday, April 12, 2011

JSON to Java Bean conversion for Android

I have written a small add-on for inbuilt JSON Lib of Android (org.json.*). Android's in-build JSON library is very permeative and provides just the basic functionalities. There is no Tokenize functionality which can automatically convert a JSON string into its relevant Java Bean class.

Though there are few alternate open source libraries like jackson-json, gson etc. But the inbuilt JSON library of Android is pretty simple to use and with this add-on you'll be able to get the missing flavor of auto-bean conversion.

How to use it ?
Please download the JSONHandler.java and include in your Android project source code. It provides an important method parse() which can convert a JSON string into Java Bean class.
It uses Java re-factoring, so Bean class field name and JSON property name should exactly match. Let's look into how to parse a simple JSON structure-
String jsonString = "{name: 'Jon Smith', id: 1234, " +
    "address: {cityName: 'San Diego', pinCode:345, latitude: 23.789, longitude: 78.965}," +
                    "}";
To parse above JSON structure you need to create a Bean class- Person.java having following properties and their Get/Set methods-
String name;
int id;
Address address;
As you can see Address is again a custom class- Address.java having following properties and their Get/Set methods-
String cityName;
int pinCode;
double latitude;
double longitude;

Once you define above 2 bean classes, you can use following piece of code to parse the JSON string into above bean class-
Person person = (Person)(new JSONHandler().parse(jsonString, Person.class, "com.prasanta"));
In the above code piece, "com.prasanta" is the name of base package under which Bean classes are defined.

Let's take an example where the JSON String itself is an Array-
String jsonString = "messages: [{id: 1, sub: 'Hi1', msg: 'I am here1'}, {id: 2, sub: 'Hi2', msg: 'I am here2'}]";
Above information represents an array of Message objects. Structure of Message.java (with Get/Set methods)-
int id;
String sub;
String msg;

JSONHandler.parse() method accepts only JSON Object and not JSONArray. So, we need to parse this array and pass individual JSON Object to the parse()-
JSONObject object = (JSONObject) new JSONTokener(json_resp.getResponseMessage()).nextValue();
JSONArray messages = object.getJSONArray("messages");

 for(int i=0; i LT messages.length(); i++){
    JSONObject message = messages.getJSONObject(i);
    Message msg = (Message)new JSONHandler().parse(message.toString(), Message.class, "com.prasanta");
 }
In the above code piece, "com.prasanta" is the name of base package under which Bean classes are defined.

So, how good is that :-) You can enhance the parsing logic as per your requirement. 

7 comments:

  1. this assume that you know exactly the content of the data you received and it structure

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  2. Hi,
    not exactly. To avoid dependency on actual JSON data format, it is using reflection technique.

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  3. Have not tried this yet, but seems like an elegant solution. I was looking at gson, but was turned away because it uses the toString method for conversion. This solution allows to defying the json conversion in any location.

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  4. Hi We are having problem uploading images through JSON webservices.Do you have any solution for this?

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  5. Hi,

    Thank you this class ! I need to convert for my project a string (Json format) to a bean file, but I don't want to deploy a big library like Jackson. Your class is perfect ~

    Unfortunately, when it tried to use it, a strange exception occurred at the second line.
    "Value this of type java.lang.string cannot be covert to JSONObject". Do you have any idea ?

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  6. I am using this JSONHandler.java to parse json object returned from server into java beans in one of my android application. I have tested my functionality on 3 different devices, it works fine only for 2 and in one device it is not able to parse. Following are the errors it throws after debugging
    1. model not present
    -> Type not present exception

    This error comes only in samsung Galaxy

    Any idea about why it is so and what does it mean?

    Regards
    Ashish Upadhyay

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks a lot prasantha... your jsonhandler class solved my problem... thank you very much

    Regards
    Amit Pateriya

    ReplyDelete