@JsonSerialize not working

Question

In Spring/Hibernate project, in my entity class I have:

package klab.finance.main.entity;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonIgnoreProperties;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.annotation.JsonDeserialize;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.annotation.JsonSerialize;
import klab.backend.entity.postgres.base.BaseEntity;
import klab.backend.utils.DateTimeUtils;
import klab.backend.utils.JsonDateTime;
import klab.backend.utils.json.LocalDateTimeToTimestampDeserializer;
import klab.backend.utils.json.TimestampToLocalDateTimeSerializer;
import org.hibernate.annotations.Where;
import org.joda.time.LocalDateTime;

import javax.persistence.*;
import java.util.HashSet;
import java.util.Set;

@Entity
@Table(name="transactions")
@JsonIgnoreProperties(ignoreUnknown = true)
public class Transaction extends BaseEntity {

    private Long bankTransactionDate;

    @Column(name="bank_transaction_date")
    @JsonSerialize(using = TimestampToLocalDateTimeSerializer.class)
    public Long getBankTransactionDate(){
        return bankTransactionDate;
    }

    @JsonDeserialize(using = LocalDateTimeToTimestampDeserializer.class)
    public void setBankTransactionDate(Long bankTransactionDate){
        this.bankTransactionDate=bankTransactionDate;
    }
}

My serializer class:

package klab.backend.utils.json;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonGenerator;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonSerializer;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializerProvider;
import klab.backend.entity.postgres.base.BaseEntity;
import klab.backend.utils.DateTimeUtils;
import org.joda.time.LocalDateTime;

import java.io.IOException;

public class TimestampToLocalDateTimeSerializer extends JsonSerializer<Long> {

    @Override
    public void serialize(Long value, JsonGenerator jsonGenerator, SerializerProvider serializerProvider)
            throws IOException {

        jsonGenerator.writeString("blabla");
    }
}

I expect to get JSON with "bank_transaction_date": "blabla".

Instead, I get it with "bank_transaction_date": null. I also notice, that if I set a breakpoint in my serializer, debugger is never stopping there, so it is probably not used.

What's wrong?

Answer 1

The answer was very simple: bankTransactionDate was null, and it turns out, that for null values serializer is not called :)

Once I filled database with values, serializer started to work and gave me "bank_transaction_date": "blabla".