jackson deserialization json to java-objects

Question

Here is my Java code which is used for the de-serialization, i am trying to convert json string into java object. In doing so i have used the following code:

package ex1jackson;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonGenerationException;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;
import java.io.IOException;
public class Ex1jackson {
public static void main(String[] args) {
   ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
try {
        String userDataJSON = "[{\"id\":\"value11\",\"name\": \"value12\",\"qty\":\"value13\"},"
                              + "{\"id\": \"value21\",\"name\":\"value22\",\"qty\": \"value23\"}]";
        product userFromJSON = mapper.readValue(userDataJSON, product.class);
        System.out.println(userFromJSON);
    } catch (JsonGenerationException e) {
        System.out.println(e);
        } catch (JsonMappingException e) {
       System.out.println(e);
    } catch (IOException e) {
    System.out.println(e);
    } 
}
}

and my product.java class

package ex1jackson;
public class product 
{
private String id;
private String name; 
private String qty; 

@Override
public String toString() {
    return "Product [id=" + id+ ", name= " + name+",qty="+qty+"]";
}
}

i am getting the following error.

com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.exc.UnrecognizedPropertyException: 
Unrecognized field "id" (class ex1jackson.product), not marked as ignorable (0 known properties: ]) at 
[Source: java.io.StringReader@16f76a8; line: 1, column: 8] (through reference chain: ex1jackson.product["id"]) 
BUILD SUCCESSFUL (total time: 0 seconds)

help me to solve this,

Answer 1

It looks like you are trying to read an object from JSON that actually describes an array. Java objects are mapped to JSON objects with curly braces {} but your JSON actually starts with square brackets [] designating an array.

What you actually have is a List<product> To describe generic types, due to Java's type erasure, you must use a TypeReference. Your deserialization could read: myProduct = objectMapper.readValue(productJson, new TypeReference<List<product>>() {});

A couple of other notes: your classes should always be PascalCased. Your main method can just be public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception which saves you all the useless catch blocks.