Create list of custom objects from flat JSON data

Question

I want to create an arraylist of type Adapter from a JSON. But since the JSON is not in arraylist format, I'm unable to use gson.fromJson() method.

Is there any way by which I can create a list of my custom object by parsing the following JSON?

JSON data:

"source":{"adapter-config.adapter[0].name":"testAdapter1",
"adapter-config.adapter[0].resolverName":"serviceResolver",
"adapter-config.adapter[0].parameters[0].key":"serviceId",
"adapter-config.adapter[0].parameters[0].value":"serviceIdPathInEvent",
"adapter-config.adapter[0].parameters[1].key":"appId",
"adapter-config.adapter[0].parameters[1].value":"appIdPathEvent",
"adapter-config.adapter[0].parameters[2].key":"env",
"adapter-config.adapter[0].parameters[2].value":"envPathInEvnet"}

My Adapter Object:

public class Adapter {
    private String name;
    private String resolverName;
    private List<KeyValuePair<String, String>> attributeList;
}

Answer 1

Gson does not provide such functionality out of the box. However you can achieve this by manually reading the JSON data from a JsonReader, consuming the JSON property names with nextName() and then parsing them to determine which data they represent. You could either directly read from a JsonReader, or in case the shown JSON data is only an extract from a larger JSON document, you can implement a TypeAdapter for your List<Adapter>. That TypeAdapter could then either be registered with a GsonBuilder by providing new TypeToken<List<Adapter>>() {}.getType() as type, or you could annotate the field holding the List<Adapter> with @JsonAdapter.

For the actual parsing of List<Adapter>, I would recommend storing a current adapter (and its index in the list) in a local variable. Whenever you parse a JSON property name, you could then check if the index encoded in the name is equal to the index of the current adapter, then you are going to modify the existing instance, otherwise if the encoded index is equal to the index of the current adapter + 1 you create a new Adapter instance, add it to the list of adapters and reassign the current adapter variable and its index variable. Then you continue with parsing the remainder of the property name to find out which Adapter field values to set.

(In case you get stuck there, feel free to let me know in the comments and I can try to provide some concrete code; but it would probably be best if you tried it yourself first.)