Ignore missing properties during Jackson JSON deserialization in Java

Question

In the example

class Person {
   String name;
   int age;
}

If the JSON object has a missing property 'age',

{
    "name": "John"
}

Person person = objectMapper.readValue(jsonFileReader, Person.class);

it throws a JsonMappingException saying it cannot deserialize. Is there an annotation to ignore missing fields during deserialization?

Answer 1

I think what you want is

@JsonSerialize(include = JsonSerialize.Inclusion.NON_NULL)
public class Person {
  ...
}

that's the Jackson 1.x way. I think there's a new way in 2.x. Something like

@JsonInclude(Include.NON_NULL)
public class Person {
  ...
}

These will tell Jackson to only serialize values that are not null, and don't complain when deserializing a missing value. I think it will just set it to the Java default.