Get nested JSON object with GSON using retrofit-open source projects square/retrofit

@BrianRoach’s solution is the correct solution. It is worth noting that in the special case where you have nested custom objects that both need a custom TypeAdapter, you must register the TypeAdapter with the new instance of GSON, otherwise the second TypeAdapter will never be called. This is because we are creating a new Gson instance inside our custom deserializer.

For example, if you had the following json:

{
    "status": "OK",
    "reason": "some reason",
    "content": {
        "foo": 123,
        "bar": "some value",
        "subcontent": {
            "useless": "field",
            "data": {
                "baz": "values"
            }
        }
    }
}

And you wanted this JSON to be mapped to the following objects:

class MainContent
{
    public int foo;
    public String bar;
    public SubContent subcontent;
}

class SubContent
{
    public String baz;
}

You would need to register the SubContent‘s TypeAdapter. To be more robust, you could do the following:

public class MyDeserializer implements JsonDeserializer {
    private final Class mNestedClazz;
    private final Object mNestedDeserializer;

    public MyDeserializer(Class nestedClazz, Object nestedDeserializer) {
        mNestedClazz = nestedClazz;
        mNestedDeserializer = nestedDeserializer;
    }

    @Override
    public T deserialize(JsonElement je, Type type, JsonDeserializationContext jdc) throws JsonParseException {
        // Get the "content" element from the parsed JSON
        JsonElement content = je.getAsJsonObject().get("content");

        // Deserialize it. You use a new instance of Gson to avoid infinite recursion
        // to this deserializer
        GsonBuilder builder = new GsonBuilder();
        if (mNestedClazz != null && mNestedDeserializer != null) {
            builder.registerTypeAdapter(mNestedClazz, mNestedDeserializer);
        }
        return builder.create().fromJson(content, type);

    }
}

and then create it like so:

MyDeserializer myDeserializer = new MyDeserializer(SubContent.class,
                    new SubContentDeserializer());
Gson gson = new GsonBuilder().registerTypeAdapter(Content.class, myDeserializer).create();

This could easily be used for the nested “content” case as well by simply passing in a new instance of MyDeserializer with null values.