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  • Jul 11, 2020
  • Post Nº 147

Vavr Jackson 1.0.0 Alpha 3

Release note of Vavr Jackson 1.0.0 Alpha 3.

Introduction

Vavr Jackson is a Jackson datatype module for Vavr library. On July 04, 2020, Vavr Jackson 1.0.0-alpha-3 was released. This post describes changes that were made between previous version 0.10.2 and the current version 1.0.0-alpha-3. To use the new version, here is what you need to do in Maven or Gradle.

Maven:

<dependency>
  <groupId>io.vavr</groupId>
  <artifactId>vavr-jackson</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0-alpha-3</version>
</dependency>

Gradle:

compile("io.vavr:vavr-jackson:1.0.0-alpha-3")

If you never use it before, it’s really simple: you just need to register the Vavr module into your Jackson object mapper and Vavr Jackson will handle all the serialization and deserialization of Vavr types for you:

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
mapper.registerModule(new VavrModule());

Now, let’s get started to see the changes!

Testing

Upgrade to JUnit 5. The testing framework used by Vavr Jackson had been upgraded from JUnit 4 to JUnit 5 thanks to the contribution of Edgar Asatryan (@nstdio). Most of the assertions remain the same, but it’s still very valuable because it helps us to reduce technical debt, make it possible to use new syntax and new features when writing new tests. The tests are less verbose because the public modifier can be removed from test-cases. Also, the expected exception pattern @Test(expected = MyException.class) is replaced by assertThrows(...), which makes exception-assertions more explicit. https://github.com/vavr-io/vavr-jackson/pull/137

Testing Jackson 2.7+. Vavr Jackson can run with any Jackson version after Jackson 2.7 (included), but we are missing some versions in our CI. To be 100% sure we support them, now we are running our tests over all the latest patch-versions of Jackson 2.7+: 2.7.2 / 2.8.11 / 2.9.10 / 2.10.4 / 2.11.0. https://github.com/vavr-io/vavr-jackson/pull/159

Testing Java 11 and 14. Vavr Jackson is compiled with Java 8 and can be used in Java 8+ environments, but we never tested it before. To more this more explicit, we added the LTS versions: Java 11 and Java 14 to our CI. To support this, the Gradle build version had been upgraded from 5.6 to 6.3 as well. https://github.com/vavr-io/vavr-jackson/pull/151

Contextualization

In Jackson, contextualization is an important concept for serialization or deserialization. It allows serializers and deserializers to be configured via annotations. For example, if we have a date class YearMonth encapsulated by a VAVR class Option as follows, where JSON format is configured outside of Option:

@JsonFormat(shape = JsonFormat.Shape.STRING, pattern = "MM-yyyy")
Option<YearMonth> operatingMonth;

In this case, without contextualization, the annotation will only be used by Option serializer and deserializer, not by YearMonth, because the context is lost. So serializing a year-month may result to its ISO-format, which is “yyyy-MM”. With contextualization, we can create a custom serializer or deserializer with configuration preserved. So serializing a year-month will result in text in the format “MM-yyyy”, as specified by the user. To support this, we implemented two Jackson interfaces, respectively for VAVR serializers and VAVR deserializers:

  • com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ser.ContextualSerializer
  • com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.ContextualDeserializer

Now, all the serializers and deserializers of VAVR Jackson supports contextualization: ArraySerializer, LazySerializer, MapSerializer, MultimapSerializer, OptionSerializer, ArrayDeserializer, LazyDeserializer, MapDeserializer, MultimapDeserializer, OptionDeserializer, PriorityQueueDeserializer, SeqDeserializer, SetDeserializer.

Related issue: https://github.com/vavr-io/vavr-jackson/issues/157

Key Comparator

The key comparator used by map-like deserializer was done incorrectly. As a result, for ordered map-like objects whose keys are the values of an enum, the default ordering was incorrect. We used alphabetical order instead of the enum ordinal order. This bug is fixed in the current version. https://github.com/vavr-io/vavr-jackson/issues/142

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the changes made in VAVR Jackson 1.0.0 Alpha 3. You can visit our milestone v1.0.0-alpha-3 to access the complete list of issues and pull-requests. If you had any feature request or found any bugs, please reach us on GitHub by creating an issue: https://github.com/vavr-io/vavr-jackson/issues. Hope you enjoy this article, see you the next time!

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