Bind a String value to an enum in a #RequestBody entity in Spring Boot - spring

Question

I am using Spring Boot to write a web service. I have an entity Animal and an enum Kind that can be either Kind.DOG or Kind.CAT. The Animal class contains private Kind kind as one of its instance variables. When I make an HTTP request, I pass in a string value for kind and when the request maps to the header:
#RequestMapping(method=RequestMethod.POST, value="/create")
public ResponseEntity<Animal> createAnimal(#RequestBody Animal animal)
I want kind to be internally converted to Kind.DOG/Kind.CAT if I am passed in either "dog" or "cat". Right now, if I pass in DOG or CAT, it works fine but if's lowercase it doesn't. Can someone tell me what to do? I tried the following:
#InitBinder
public void initBinder(WebDataBinder dataBinder) {
dataBinder.registerCustomEditor(Kind.class, new KindEnumConverter());
}
#RequestMapping(method=RequestMethod.POST, value="/create")
public ResponseEntity<Animal> createAnimal(#RequestBody Animal animal)
and
public class KindEnumConverter extends PropertyEditorSupport {
#Override
public void setAsText(String text) throws IllegalArgumentException {
setValue(Kind.valueOf(text.toUpperCase()));
}
}
but it didn't work.

Answer 1

InitBinder won't work with #RequestBody as per my experience.
We use Spring Boot and the way I solved this problem is, I excluded all the jackson related dependencies from spring-boot-starter-web, so that I can use latest jackson.
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-annotations</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-datatype-jsr310</artifactId>
</exclusion>
</exclusions>
</dependency>
And then I added the latest jackson dependencies as:
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-databind</artifactId>
<version>2.9.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-core</artifactId>
<version>2.9.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.core</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-annotations</artifactId>
<version>2.9.1</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-datatype-jsr310</artifactId>
<version>2.9.1</version>
</dependency>
Now that we have the new jackson library we can just set this in the application.properties file:
spring.jackson.mapper.accept_case_insensitive_enums=true
In case you use YAML, then:
spring:
jackson:
mapper:
accept_case_insensitive_enums: true
Inspiration: https://stackoverflow.com/a/44217670/1781024