Strange Jackson exception being thrown when serializing Hibernate object

Question

Jackson is throwing a weird exception that I don't know how to fix. I'm using Spring, Hibernate and Jackson.

I have already considered that lazy-loading is causing the problem, but I have taken measures to tell Jackson to NOT process various properties as follows:

@JsonIgnoreProperties({ "sentMessages", "receivedMessages", "educationFacility" })
public class Director extends UserAccount implements EducationFacilityUser {
   ....
}

I have done the same thing for all the other UserAccount subclasses as well.

Here's the exception being thrown:

org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException: No serializer found for class org.hibernate.proxy.pojo.javassist.JavassistLazyInitializer and no properties discovered to create BeanSerializer (to avoid exception, disable SerializationConfig.Feature.FAIL_ON_EMPTY_BEANS) ) (through reference chain: java.util.ArrayList[46]->jobprep.domain.educationfacility.Director_$$_javassist_2["handler"])
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.StdSerializerProvider$1.serialize(StdSerializerProvider.java:62)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.BeanPropertyWriter.serializeAsField(BeanPropertyWriter.java:268)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.BeanSerializer.serializeFields(BeanSerializer.java:146)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.BeanSerializer.serialize(BeanSerializer.java:118)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.ContainerSerializers$IndexedListSerializer.serializeContents(ContainerSerializers.java:236)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.ContainerSerializers$IndexedListSerializer.serializeContents(ContainerSerializers.java:189)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.ContainerSerializers$AsArraySerializer.serialize(ContainerSerializers.java:111)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.StdSerializerProvider._serializeValue(StdSerializerProvider.java:296)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ser.StdSerializerProvider.serializeValue(StdSerializerProvider.java:224)
    at org.codehaus.jackson.map.ObjectMapper.writeValue(ObjectMapper.java:925)
    at org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter.writeInternal(MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter.java:153)

Suggestions on how I can get more info to see what's causing this? Anyone know how to fix it?

EDIT: I discovered that getHander() and other get*() methods exist on the proxy object. GRR!! Is there any way I can tell Jackson to not process anything on the proxy, or am I sol? This is really weird because the method that spits out the JSON only crashes under certain circumstances, not all the time. Nonetheless, it's due to the get*() methods on the proxy object.

Aside: Proxies are evil. They disrupt Jackson, equals() and many other parts of regular Java programming. I am tempted to ditch Hibernate altogether :/

Answer 1

It's not ideal, but you could disable Jackson's auto-discovery of JSON properties, using @JsonAutoDetect at the class level. This would prevent it from trying to handle the Javassist stuff (and failing).

This means that you then have to annotate each getter manually (with @JsonProperty), but that's not necessarily a bad thing, since it keeps things explicit.

Answer 2

I had a similar problem with lazy loading via the hibernate proxy object. Got around it by annotating the class having lazyloaded private properties with:

@JsonIgnoreProperties({"hibernateLazyInitializer", "handler"})

I assume you can add the properties on your proxy object that breaks the JSON serialization to that annotation.

Avoid Jackson serialization on non fetched lazy objects

Answer 3

i got the same error, but with no relation to Hibernate. I got scared here from all frightening suggestions, which i guess relevant in case of Hibernate and lazy loading... However, in my case i got the error since in an inner class i had no getters/setters, so the BeanSerializer could not serialize the data...

Adding getters & setters resolved the problem.

Answer 4

For what it's worth, there is Jackson Hibernate module project that just started, and which should solve this problem and hopefully others as well. Project is related to Jackson project, although not part of core source. This is mostly to allow simpler release process; it will require Jackson 1.7 as that's when Module API is being introduced.

Answer 5

I had the same problem. See if you are using hibernatesession.load(). If so, try converting to hibernatesession.get(). This solved my problem.

Answer 6

I had the same error message from spring's @RestController. My rest controller class was using spring's JpaRepository class and by replacing repository.getOne(id) method call with repository.findOne(id) problem was gone.

Answer 7

You can use jackson-datatype-hibernate module to solve this problem. It work for me. reference: https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-datatype-hibernate

Answer 8

I got the same issue, salutations are here

Avoid Jackson serialization on non fetched lazy objects

http://blog.pastelstudios.com/2012/03/12/spring-3-1-hibernate-4-jackson-module-hibernate/

https://github.com/nessonqk/jackson-datatype-hibernate

Answer 9

Similar to other answers, the problem for me was declaring a many-to-one column to do lazy fetching. Switching to eager fetching fixed the problem. Before:

@ManyToOne(targetEntity = StatusCode.class, fetch = FetchType.LAZY)

After:

@ManyToOne(targetEntity = StatusCode.class, fetch = FetchType.EAGER)

Answer 10

You could use @JsonIgnoreProperties(value = { "handler", "hibernateLazyInitializer" }) annotation on your class "Director"

Answer 11

You can add a Jackson mixin on Object.class to always ignore hibernate-related properties. If you are using Spring Boot put this in your Application class:

@Bean
public Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder jacksonBuilder() {
    Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder b = new Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder();
    b.mixIn(Object.class, IgnoreHibernatePropertiesInJackson.class);
    return b;
}


@JsonIgnoreProperties({"hibernateLazyInitializer", "handler"})
private abstract class IgnoreHibernatePropertiesInJackson{ }

Answer 12

I am New to Jackson API, when i got the "org.codehaus.jackson.map.JsonMappingException: No serializer found for class com.company.project.yourclass" , I added the getter and setter to com.company.project.yourclass, that helped me to use the ObjectMapper's mapper object to write the java object into a flat file.

Answer 13

I faced the same issue and It is really strange that the same code works in few case whereas it failed in some random cases.

I got it fixed by just making sure the proper setter/getter (Making sure the case sensitivity)

Answer 14

I tried @JsonDetect and

@JsonIgnoreProperties(value = { "handler", "hibernateLazyInitializer" })

Neither of them worked for me. Using a third-party module seemed like a lot of work to me. So I just tried making a get call on any property of the lazy object before passing to jackson for serlization. The working code snippet looked something like this :

@RequestMapping(value = "/authenticate", produces = "application/json; charset=utf-8")
    @ResponseBody
    @Transactional
    public Account authenticate(Principal principal) {
        UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken usernamePasswordAuthenticationToken = (UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken) principal;
        LoggedInUserDetails loggedInUserDetails = (LoggedInUserDetails) usernamePasswordAuthenticationToken.getPrincipal();
        User user = userRepository.findOne(loggedInUserDetails.getUserId());
        Account account = user.getAccount();
        account.getFullName();      //Since, account is lazy giving it directly to jackson for serlization didn't worked & hence, this quick-fix.
        return account;
    }

Answer 15

Also you can make your domain object Director final. It is not perfect solution but it prevent creating proxy-subclass of you domain class.