The Short Version:
I am using Jersey 1.17 and Jackson 2.1.4, but Jersey is ignoring every single Jackson-annotation that I use. Why!? Has anybody encountered the same problem?
The Long Version:
I have a RESTful Web Service that was using Jersey 1.17 and Jackson 1.9.2 and I was using the @JsonManagedReference and @JsonBackReference annotations to solve the problem with bidirectional relationships and everything was working fine.
The other day I saw the 2.1.4 version of Jackson that included the @JsonIdentityInfo annotation which seemed like a great solution for my problems so I changed the jar files to Jackson 2.1.4. However, the promising @JsonIdentityInfo annotation was not working and Jersey was ignoring it completely, and after a bit of debugging and changing the code, I found out that even the previous @JsonManagedReference and @JsonBackReference annotations are being ignored by Jersey. So it seems that Jersey is completely ignoring the Jackson 2.1.4 annotations. Why!? Has anybody encountered the same problem?
As stated in http://wiki.fasterxml.com/JacksonAnnotations:
Important note: Jackson 1.x and 2.x annotations live in different Java
and Maven packages: see Jackson 2.0 for full explanation:
- 1.x annotations are in Java package
org.codehaus.jackson.annotate, in Jackson core jar
- 2.x annotations are in Java package
com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation, in "jackson-databind" jar.
So could be an "import-related" problem.
Another reason (as already stated by @HiJon89) is to use the right JacksonJsonProvider version. For version 2.x it's automatically registered while inserting the "jackson-jaxrs-json-provider" combined with "jersey-core".
My currently working update to jackson 2.1.4 (from a 1.9.2 jersey required dependency) was:
- remove jersey-json dependency
add jersey-core and jackson-jaxrs-json-provider
<dependency>
<groupId>com.sun.jersey</groupId>
<artifactId>jersey-core</artifactId>
<version>${jersey.version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fasterxml.jackson.jaxrs</groupId>
<artifactId>jackson-jaxrs-json-provider</artifactId>
<version>${jackson-jaxrs-json-provider.version}</version>
</dependency>
The latter jar has a file "META-INF/services/javax.ws.rs.ext.MessageBodyWriter" that tell jersey what class act as a provider.
So I've no other advise than to double-check that you don't have the old jars anymore in your classpath.
In my case jackson annotations were ignored because of proguard
