Project to build Jackson (http://jackson.codehaus.org) module (jar) to support JSON serialization and deserialization of Hibernate (http://hibernate.org) specific datatypes and properties; especially lazy-loading aspects.

As of version 2.0 module is usable and used by non-trivial number of developers and projects. Rough edges may still exist; please report any bugs you find.

Note: both Hibernate 3 and 4 are supported, but they require different jar, and Maven artifact names (and jar names differ). This document refers to "Hibernate 4" version, but changes with 3 should be little more than replacing "4" in names with "3".

To use module on Maven-based projects, use following dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype</groupId>
  <artifactId>jackson-datatype-hibernate4</artifactId>
  <version>2.1.1</version>
</dependency>    

(or whatever version is most up-to-date at the moment; note that you need to use "jackson-datatype-hibernate3" for Hibernate 3.x)

Like all standard Jackson modules (libraries that implement Module interface), registration is done as follows:

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
// for Hibernate 4.x:
mapper.registerModule(new HibernateModule4());
// or, for Hibernate 3.6
mapper.registerModule(new HibernateModule3());

after which functionality is available for all normal Jackson operations.

Note that there are actuall

(as contributed by Frank Hess)

First step: sub-class ObjectMapper and register the module

public class HibernateAwareObjectMapper extends ObjectMapper {
  public HibernateAwareObjectMapper() {
    HibernateModule hm = new HibernateModule();
    registerModule(hm);
    configure(Feature.FAIL_ON_EMPTY_BEANS, false);
  }

  public void setPrettyPrint(boolean prettyPrint) {
    configure(Feature.INDENT_OUTPUT, prettyPrint);
  }
}

Second step register the new ObjectMapper:

<bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.annotation.AnnotationMethodHandlerAdapter">
 <property name="messageConverters">
  <array>
    <bean id="jsonConverter"
  	   class="org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJacksonHttpMessageConverter">
      <property name="objectMapper">
        <bean class="campus.authorweb.util.HibernateAwareObjectMapper"/>
      </property>
    </bean>
  </array>
 </property>
</bean>

This seems to do the trick.