How do you globally set Jackson to ignore unknown properties within Spring?

Question

Jackson has annotations for ignoring unknown properties within a class using:

@JsonIgnoreProperties(ignoreUnknown = true) 

It allows you to ignore a specific property using this annotation:

@JsonIgnore

If you'd like to globally set it you can modify the object mapper:

// jackson 1.9 and before
objectMapper.configure(DeserializationConfig.Feature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES, false);
// or jackson 2.0
objectMapper.configure(DeserializationFeature.FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES, false);

How do you set this globally using spring so it can be @Autowired at server start up without writing additional classes?

Answer 1

This can be achieved using spring's MethodInvokingFactoryBean:

<!-- Jackson Mapper -->
<bean id="jacksonObjectMapper" class="org.codehaus.jackson.map.ObjectMapper" />
<bean class="org.springframework.beans.factory.config.MethodInvokingFactoryBean">
    <property name="targetObject" ref="jacksonObjectMapper" />
    <property name="targetMethod" value="configure" />
    <property name="arguments">
        <list>
            <value type="org.codehaus.jackson.map.DeserializationConfig.Feature">FAIL_ON_UNKNOWN_PROPERTIES</value>
            <value>false</value>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>

This can be wired to a RestTemplate like this:

<bean id="restTemplate" class="org.springframework.web.client.RestTemplate">
    <property name="messageConverters">
        <list>
            <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter">
                <property name="objectMapper" ref="jacksonObjectMapper" />
            </bean>
        </list>
    </property>
</bean>

It can also be injected directly into the message converters for use with Spring MVC:

<mvc:annotation-driven>
    <mvc:message-converters>
        <!-- Jackson converter for HTTP messages -->
        <bean class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter">
            <property name="objectMapper" ref="jacksonObjectMapper" />
        </bean>
    </mvc:message-converters>
</mvc:annotation-driven>