How to change Jackson to detect all fields in a POJO, other than only public ones?

When using Spring Boot for a project, Jackson came as default to serialize objects back and from Jsons. I realize that Jackson fails if you don't have public accessors, e.g., getters/setters, or public fields in your POJO.

The behavior is different when I switch to Gson. It detects all fields regardless of their visibility. For this reason, I ended up using Gson.

I felt a little uncomfortable about switching my POJO access rules; It would force some refactoring in the project structure.

So, no problems using Gson, but is there a way of change Jackson's behavior?

Solution

Jackson does support reading values from private member fields, but does not do it by default.

You can configure the behavior globally in the Spring Boot config like

jackson:
  visibility.field: any
  visibility.getter: none
  visibility.setter: none
  visibility.is-getter: none

(this config will only look for member fields and no longer check get, set and is methods)

You could also use the @JsonAutoDetect annotation to do the same setting for a specific class.