how to parse JSON file with GSON

Question

I have a very simple JSON with reviews for products, like:

{
  "reviewerID": "A2XVJBSRI3SWDI", 
  "asin": "0000031887", 
  "reviewerName": "abigail", 
  "helpful": [0, 0], 
  "unixReviewTime": 1383523200, 
  "reviewText": "Perfect red tutu for the price. ", 
  "overall": 5.0, 
  "reviewTime": "11 4, 2013", "summary": "Nice tutu"
}
{ 
  "reviewerID": "A2G0LNLN79Q6HR", 
  "asin": "0000031887", 
  "reviewerName": "aj_18 \"Aj_18\"", 
  "helpful": [1, 1], 
  "unixReviewTime": 1337990400, 
  "reviewText": "This was a really cute", 
 "overall": 4.0, 
 "reviewTime": "05 26, 2012", 
 "summary": "Really Cute but rather short."
}

I'd like to read it into my Java app using GSON. I have built a class to hold results for each review:

public class Review {
    private String reviewerID;
    private String asin;
    private String reviewerName;
    private ArrayList<Integer> helpful;
    private String reviewText;
    private Double overall;
    private String summary;
    private Long unixReviewTime;
    private String reviewTime;

    public Review() {
        this.helpful = Lists.newArrayList();
    }
    // some getters and setters...

To read the JSON file, my code is:

Gson gson = new Gson();
JsonReader reader = new JsonReader(new FileReader(filename));
Review data = gson.fromJson(reader, Review.class);
data.toScreen(); // prints to screen some values

With this code, I can only retrieve the first review in the JSON, so my question is: how to iterate through all the reader and get the next reviews? I don't need to store the reviews in a List, just need to access the object once. Any help more than welcome.

Answer 1

You have to fetch the whole data in the list and then do the iteration as it is a file and will become inefficient otherwise.

private static final Type REVIEW_TYPE = new TypeToken<List<Review>>() {
}.getType();
Gson gson = new Gson();
JsonReader reader = new JsonReader(new FileReader(filename));
List<Review> data = gson.fromJson(reader, REVIEW_TYPE); // contains the whole reviews list
data.toScreen(); // prints to screen some values