Android Tutorial => Custom JSON Deserializer using Gson

Example

Imagine you have all dates in all responses in some custom format, for instance /Date(1465935152)/ and you want apply general rule to deserialize all Json dates to java Date instances. In this case you need to implement custom Json Deserializer.

Example of json:

{
  "id": 1,
  "created_on": "Date(1465935152)",
  "updated_on": "Date(1465968945)",
  "name": "Oleksandr"
}

Suppose we have this class below:

class User {
    @SerializedName("id")
    long id;
    @SerializedName("created_on")
    Date createdOn;
    @SerializedName("updated_on")
    Date updatedOn;
    @SerializedName("name")
    String name;
}

Custom deserializer:

class DateDeSerializer implements JsonDeserializer<Date> {
    private static final String DATE_PREFIX = "/Date(";
    private static final String DATE_SUFFIX = ")/";

    @Override
    public Date deserialize(JsonElement json, Type typeOfT, JsonDeserializationContext context) throws JsonParseException {
        String dateString = json.getAsString();
        if (dateString.startsWith(DATE_PREFIX) && dateString.endsWith(DATE_SUFFIX)) {
            dateString = dateString.substring(DATE_PREFIX.length(), dateString.length() - DATE_SUFFIX.length());
        } else {
            throw new JsonParseException("Wrong date format: " + dateString);
        }
        return new Date(Long.parseLong(dateString) - TimeZone.getDefault().getRawOffset());
    }
}

And the usage:

Gson gson = new GsonBuilder()
                .registerTypeAdapter(Date.class, new DateDeSerializer())
                .create();
String json = "....";
User user = gson.fromJson(json, User.class);

Serialize and deserialize Jackson JSON strings with Date types

This also applies to the case where you want to make Gson Date conversion compatible with Jackson, for example.

Jackson usually serializes Date to "milliseconds since epoch" whereas Gson uses a readable format like Aug 31, 2016 10:26:17 to represent Date. This leads to JsonSyntaxExceptions in Gson when you try to deserialize a Jackson format Date.

To circumvent this, you can add a custom serializer and a custom deserializer:

JsonSerializer<Date> ser = new JsonSerializer<Date>() {
    @Override
    public JsonElement serialize(Date src, Type typeOfSrc, JsonSerializationContext
                context) {
        return src == null ? null : new JsonPrimitive(src.getTime());
    }
};

JsonDeserializer<Date> deser = new JsonDeserializer<Date>() {
    @Override
    public Date deserialize(JsonElement json, Type typeOfT,
                JsonDeserializationContext context) throws JsonParseException {
        return json == null ? null : new Date(json.getAsLong());
    }
};

Gson gson = new GsonBuilder()
                .registerTypeAdapter(Date.class, ser)
                .registerTypeAdapter(Date.class, deser)
                .create();

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Android Gson Custom JSON Deserializer using Gson

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