How to handle class hierarchy?

[jasminb]

How to handle class hierarchy?

[jasminb]

Hey @joaofyz, if the API does not make a type difference between Car and Vehicle than your model should not do it.

What you can do is the following:

• have one class that has all the attributes
• create a factory that will create specific subclass depending on the attributes

Now I understand that these are design choices that you made for a reason, sadly it is not possible to create different object having same type attribute.

[jasminb]

Hello,

This is not related to the JSONAPI spec but rather to jackson library.

http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonPolymorphicDeserialization

Regards

[joaofyz]

Thanks jasminb for your answer.

I was able to solve my problem with the @JsonTypeInfo and @JsonSubTypes annotations.

The only issue I identified was the need to have always de @id annotation and field in every class even if it already exists in the Super class.

[jasminb]

Hey,

I've pushed a change today that solves the inheritance issue you are referring to.
If you use SNAPSHOT version of the library, it will work with inherited @id field.

Regards

[joaofyz]

I do not use the SNAPSHOT version but I think you can close this issue.

Thanks for your help

[joaofyz]

Hi,

I'm having another problem with the hierarchical classes, now serializing the objects.

All my objects in JSONAPI are from the same type @type("object_type"), but I can not have the same @type annotation in the main and child classes. How can I do this?

Thanks

[jasminb]

Hey @joaofyz,

You cant inherit type (have multiple classes of the same type), however you can have a base class that has most of your attributes and than extend it and specify the type and additional attributes that you need.

When you deserialise you can do the following:

MyBaseClass object = resourceConverter.readDocument(data, MyBaseClass.class);

object will be instance of the correct subtype depending on the type attribute present in the data.

As for serialisation, no problem there, just writeDocument as usual.

[joaofyz]

I don't think this will solve my issue. Let me try to explain what I want to archive:

What I have now is the following:

One class Vehicle
@Type("vehicle") public class Vehicle { ... }

And a subclass Car
@Type("car") public class Car { ... }

I would like to have the @type("vehicle") in the car also.

Thanks for the help again ;)

[jasminb]

Can you give more background on why would you want to have same type on multiple classes?

[joaofyz]

Hi @jasminb

In the business prespective they are all "vehicles", so they are all mapped has vehicles.

Do you think I will be able to do this?