Jackson 1.6, improved Tree Model access; finding values of all instances of specified property
One class of improvements included in Jackson 1.6 are improvements to Tree Model accessors, added to JsonNode.
So, for example, if you have an array of User objects:
[
{ "name" : "Billy", "id" : 123 },
{ "name" : "Bob", "id" : 456, "extraInfo" : { "flags" : 3 } } // and so on
]
and you would just like to get list of names of all users, formerly you needed to write piece of glue code to get names, build a List and so on. While simple to do, it is boring and ultimately error-prone thing to have to do.
So new functionality that was added can simplify such tasks:
JsonNode root = objectMapper.readTree(json);
List<JsonNode> nameNodes = root.findValues("name");
// or, given we know they are Strings, we can get actual name values directly:
List<string> nameStrings = root.findValuesAsText("name");
Or, if you actually wanted to just find Users that have property "extraInfo" defined, you would do:
List<JsonNode> nodes = root.findParents("extraInfo");
Granted, these find methods are not superbly powerful -- hopefully we
can work on actual JSON path expressions in future -- but they help a
bit for common cases.
And even without formal expression language,
perhaps we could add filter-based alternatives for more concise
recursive-descent lookups (findValues(new NodeFilter() { .... } ) ?)
