JSON field Desrializing to lowercase in Spring Boot - spring-boot

Question

I have a Spring Boot Controller -
#RestController
public class UserController {
#PostMapping
#ResponseStatus(CREATED)
public UserResponse register( #Valid #RequestBody UserRequest userRequest) {
//return ....
}
}
Below is UserRequest.java
#Data
#NoArgsConstructor
#AllArgsConstructor
#Builder
public class UserRequest {
private String email;
//other property
}
I am sending below json in request body -
{
"email" : "TEST#Example.com",
//some other fields.
}
Sometime client send email in uppercase or in camel case so in userRquest I want to change value of email field to lowercase like test#example.com while de serializing to UserRequest Object.
Is there any easy way to do this. Can I introduce my own annotation like #ToLowerCase how I can create my own annotation and use that at field level in UserRequest.

Answer 1

There is no easy way just by introducing a new annotation #ToLowerCase,
because then you would also need to implement some annotation processor
for doing the real conversion work.
But you can achieve your goal in a slightly different way.
In your UserRequest class annotate the email property
with #JsonDeserialize and specify a converter there.
#JsonDeserialize(converter = ToLowerCaseConverter.class)
private String email;
You need to implement the converter class by yourself,
but it is easy by extending it from StdConverter.
public class ToLowerCaseConverter extends StdConverter<String, String> {
#Override
public String convert(String value) {
return value.toLowerCase();
}
}

Answer 2

Jackson will use the setter methods in your class.
Perform the conversion to lower case in the setter.
For example
public void setEmail(String newValue)
{
email = StringUtils.lowerCase(newValue);
}
StringUtils is an apache commons class.

Answer 3

You can make a general StringDeserializer and register it in ObjectMapper as shown below:-
StringDeserializer class
public final class StringDeserializer extends StdDeserializer<String> {
public StringDeserializer() {
super((Class<String>) null);
}
#Override
public String deserialize(JsonParser parser, DeserializationContext context) throws IOException {
JsonToken token = parser.getCurrentToken();
if (token == JsonToken.VALUE_STRING) {
String text = parser.getText();
return text == null ? null : text.toLowerCase().trim();
}
return null;
}
}
JacksonConfiguration class
#Configuration
public class JacksonConfiguration {
#Autowired
void mapper(ObjectMapper mapper) {
mapper.registerModule(initModule());
}
private Module initModule() {
SimpleModule module = new SimpleModule();
module.addDeserializer(String.class, new StringDeserializer());
return module;
}
}
The above code makes jackson deserialize all strings to lowercase and trimmed.