How to ignore “null” or empty properties in json, globally, using Spring configuration

I’m trying to return only the properties that have values, but the null ones are also being returned.

I know that there’s an annotation that does this ( @JsonInclude(Include.NON_NULL) ), but then I need these in every single entity class.

So, my question is: Is there a way to configure this globally through spring config? (avoiding XML, preferably)

EDIT: It seems that this question has been considered a duplicate, but I don’t think so. The real question here is how to configure it through spring config, which I couldn’t find in other questions.

Answer

If you are using Spring Boot, this is as easy as:

spring.jackson.serialization-inclusion=non_null

If not, then you can configure the ObjectMapper in the MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter like so:

@Configuration
class WebMvcConfiguration extends WebMvcConfigurationSupport {
    @Override
    protected void extendMessageConverters(List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters) {
        for(HttpMessageConverter converter: converters) {
            if(converter instanceof MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter) {
                ObjectMapper mapper = ((MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter)converter).getObjectMapper()
                mapper.setSerializationInclusion(Include.NON_NULL);
            }
        }
    }
}