Gson: How to exclude specific fields from Serialization without annotations

Question

I'm trying to learn Gson and I'm struggling with field exclusion. Here are my classes

public class Student {    

  private Long                id;

  private String              firstName        = "Philip";

  private String              middleName       = "J.";

  private String              initials         = "P.F";

  private String              lastName         = "Fry";

  private Country             country;

  private Country             countryOfBirth;

}

public class Country {    

  private Long                id;

  private String              name;

  private Object              other;

}

I can use the GsonBuilder and add an ExclusionStrategy for a field name like firstName or country but I can't seem to manage to exclude properties of certain fields like country.name.

Using the method public boolean shouldSkipField(FieldAttributes fa), FieldAttributes doesn't contain enough information to match the field with a filter like country.name.

I would appreciate any help with a solution to this problem.

P.S: I want to avoid annotations since I want to improve on this and use RegEx to filter fields out.

Thank you

Answer 1

Any fields you don't want to be serialized in general you should use the "transient" conditioner, and this also pertains to JSON serializers (at slightest it does to a some that I have used, including gson).

If you don't need the name to dispense up in the serialized JSON give it a transient keyword, eg:

private transient String name;

More expanded details in the Gson documentation