JSON serialization of JS objects with Spring.

JSON serialization of JS objects with Spring.

Problem: pass JS object from spring MVC enabled backend to HTML page, use eval (...) on object and invoke function that have been passed from backend.

Solution: By default Spring framework is using Jackson to serialize Java objects. During that serialization all members are passed as strings, while we'd like to have data structure as following:

{
    member1 : "value1",
    action : function() {
             ...
    }
}

with such an object it would be possible to do the following to invoke function:

 obj.action()

 In order to do that one would have to implement custom serializer class

public class MySerializer extends JsonSerializer<MyTO> {
    public void serialize(MyTO value, JsonGenerator jgen, SerializerProvider provider) throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
        jgen.writeStartObject();
        jgen.writeObjectField("member1", value.getMember1());
        jgen.writeFieldName("action");
        jgen.writeRaw(":" + value.getAction());
    }
}

Done. use eval on front end to convert JSON into actual JS object and enjoy.