How do I deserialize timestamps that are in seconds with Jackson?

Drew Stephens Published at Dev

Drew Stephens

I've got some JSON that has timestamps in seconds (i.e. a Unix timestamp):

{"foo":"bar","timestamp":1386280997}

Asking Jackson to deserialize this into an object with a DateTime field for the timestamp results in 1970-01-17T01:11:25.983Z, a time shortly after the epoch because Jackson is assuming it to be in milliseconds. Aside from ripping apart the JSON and adding some zeros, how might I get Jackson to understand the seconds timestamp?

Drew Stephens

I wrote a custom deserializer to handle timestamps in seconds (Groovy syntax).

class UnixTimestampDeserializer extends JsonDeserializer<DateTime> {
    Logger logger = LoggerFactory.getLogger(UnixTimestampDeserializer.class)

    @Override
    DateTime deserialize(JsonParser jp, DeserializationContext ctxt) throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
        String timestamp = jp.getText().trim()

        try {
            return new DateTime(Long.valueOf(timestamp + '000'))
        } catch (NumberFormatException e) {
            logger.warn('Unable to deserialize timestamp: ' + timestamp, e)
            return null
        }
    }
}

And then I annotated my POGO to use that for the timestamp:

class TimestampThing {
    @JsonDeserialize(using = UnixTimestampDeserializer.class)
    DateTime timestamp

    @JsonCreator
    public TimestampThing(@JsonProperty('timestamp') DateTime timestamp) {
        this.timestamp = timestamp
    }
}

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