Could not read JSON: Can not deserialize instance of hello.Country[] out of START_OBJECT token

Volodymyr Levytskyi Published at Dev

Volodymyr Levytskyi

I have rest url that gives me all countries - http://api.geonames.org/countryInfoJSON?username=volodiaL.

I use RestTemplate from spring 3 to parse returned json into java objects:

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
Country[] countries = restTemplate.getForObject("http://api.geonames.org/countryInfoJSON?username=volodiaL",Country[].class);

When I run this code I get an exception:

Caused by: com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException: Can not deserialize instance of hello.Country[] out of START_OBJECT token
 at [Source: sun.net.www.protocol.http.HttpURLConnection$HttpInputStream@1846149; line: 1, column: 1]
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonMappingException.from(JsonMappingException.java:164)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.DeserializationContext.mappingException(DeserializationContext.java:691)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.DeserializationContext.mappingException(DeserializationContext.java:685)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.std.ObjectArrayDeserializer.handleNonArray(ObjectArrayDeserializer.java:222)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.std.ObjectArrayDeserializer.deserialize(ObjectArrayDeserializer.java:133)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.std.ObjectArrayDeserializer.deserialize(ObjectArrayDeserializer.java:18)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper._readMapAndClose(ObjectMapper.java:2993)
    at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper.readValue(ObjectMapper.java:2158)
    at org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter.readJavaType(MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter.java:225)
    ... 7 more

Finally my Country class:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonIgnoreProperties;

@JsonIgnoreProperties(ignoreUnknown = true)
public class Country {
    private String countryName;
    private long geonameId;

    public String getCountryName() {
        return countryName;
    }

    public long getGeonameId() {
        return geonameId;
    }

    @Override
    public String toString() {
        return countryName;
    }
}

The problem is that returned json contains root element "geonames" which contains array of country elements like so:

{
"geonames": [
    {
        "continent": "EU",
        "capital": "Andorra la Vella",
        "languages": "ca",
        "geonameId": 3041565,
        "south": 42.42849259876837,
        "isoAlpha3": "AND",
        "north": 42.65604389629997,
        "fipsCode": "AN",
        "population": "84000",
        "east": 1.7865427778319827,
        "isoNumeric": "020",
        "areaInSqKm": "468.0",
        "countryCode": "AD",
        "west": 1.4071867141112762,
        "countryName": "Andorra",
        "continentName": "Europe",
        "currencyCode": "EUR"
    }
]
}

How to tell RestTemplate to convert each element of array into Country object?

geoand

You need to do the following:

public class CountryInfoResponse {

   @JsonProperty("geonames")
   private List<Country> countries; 

   //getter - setter
}

RestTemplate restTemplate = new RestTemplate();
List<Country> countries = restTemplate.getForObject("http://api.geonames.org/countryInfoJSON?username=volodiaL",CountryInfoResponse.class).getCountries();

It would be great if you could use some kind of annotation to allow you to skip levels, but it's not yet possible (see this and this)

Collected from the Internet

Please contact [email protected] to delete if infringement.