Converting Groovy Objects to JSON using Grails

Posted on February 14, 2009. Filed under: Grails, Groovy, Uncategorized | Tags: converting, Grails, Groovy, json |

Disclaimer: this might not be the best way to do it. I’m open for improvements, but it’s a way I’m using now, and it works pretty nice!

Currenly, I’m creating an application which does some JSON communication. Since Grails already has nice support for JSON, I wanted to reuse their libraries, but, at the moment, I don’t need a complete web Grails application. So, the plan was to reuse the JSON (deep) converters to convert my Groovy classes to JSON, and work with that. I created the following small test to try to accomplish what I wanted:


import grails.converters.JSON

println new JSON(new Person()).toString()


Well, I don’t think I’d be writing this blog entry if things were really this easy. Executing the above code fails with a nasty NullPointerException:

Caught: org.apache.commons.lang.UnhandledException: java.lang.NullPointerException
	at testjson.run(testjson.groovy:10)
	at testjson.main(testjson.groovy)

Why is this, you might ask. Well, it turns out the JSON converter is using a ConverterUtil class, which expects a GrailsApplication. When there’s no GrailsApplication, the code will fail with a NPE as a result. If you’d like to see this fixed: I’ve created a JIRA issue here.

However, I did came up with a workaround. It’s not perfect, but it works. Since the ConvertUtil is a sort of Singleton, you call it yourself, and set a DummyGrailsApplication instead. Well, instead of the dummy version, we can use a DefaultGrailsApplication instead. So, after our fix, the code looks like this:


import grails.converters.JSON
import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.commons.DefaultGrailsApplication
import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.converters.ConverterUtil

class Person {
String name = "erik"
int age = 10
}
ConverterUtil.getInstance().grailsApplication = new DefaultGrailsApplication()
println new JSON(new Person()).toString()


When running this, the following output is produced:

{"age":10,"class":"Person","name":"erik"}

Which is exactly what we want!