How to customise the Jackson JSON mapper implicitly used by Spring Boot?

Question

I'm using Spring Boot (1.2.1), in a similar fashion as in their Building a RESTful Web Service tutorial:

@RestController
public class EventController {

    @RequestMapping("/events/all")
    EventList events() {
        return proxyService.getAllEvents();
    }

}

So above, Spring MVC implicitly uses Jackson for serialising my EventList object into JSON.

But I want to do some simple customisations to the JSON format, such as:

setSerializationInclusion(JsonInclude.Include.NON_NULL)

Question is, what is the simplest way to customise the implicit JSON mapper?

I tried the approach in this blog post, creating a CustomObjectMapper and so on, but the step 3, "Register classes in the Spring context", fails:

org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: 
  Error creating bean with name 'jacksonFix': Injection of autowired dependencies failed; 
  nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException: 
  Could not autowire method: public void com.acme.project.JacksonFix.setAnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter(org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter); 
  nested exception is org.springframework.beans.factory.NoSuchBeanDefinitionException: 
  No qualifying bean of type [org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter]   
  found for dependency: expected at least 1 bean which qualifies as autowire candidate for this dependency. Dependency annotations: {}

It looks like those instructions are for older versions of Spring MVC, while I'm looking for a simple way to get this working with latest Spring Boot.

Answer 1

You can configure property inclusion, and numerous other settings, via application.properties:

spring.jackson.default-property-inclusion=non_null

There's a table in the documentation that lists all of the properties that can be used.

If you want more control, you can also customize Spring Boot's configuration programatically using a Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilderCustomizer bean, as described in the documentation:

The context’s Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder can be customized by one or more Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilderCustomizer beans. Such customizer beans can be ordered (Boot’s own customizer has an order of 0), letting additional customization be applied both before and after Boot’s customization.

Lastly, if you don't want any of Boot's configuration and want to take complete control over how the ObjectMapper is configured, declare your own Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder bean:

@Bean
Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder objectMapperBuilder() {
    Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder builder = new Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder();
    // Configure the builder to suit your needs
    return builder;
}