rohandalvi / google-gson

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Way to ignore (not serialize) cyclic reference #539

Open GoogleCodeExporter opened 9 years ago

GoogleCodeExporter commented 9 years ago
Today, the cyclic reference management with ExclusionStrategy is based on Type 
and Field properties, but sometime it would be nice to exclude some properties 
based on a particular serialization context. 

The goal would be to allow to write a "CycleDetectionStrategy" or something 
like that would behave like the json-lib 
(.setCycleDetectionStrategy(CycleDetectionStrategy.LENIENT)). Basically, this 
tells the json serializer to ignore any cyclic reference. While this might look 
scary and dangerous, it is often just what is needed and avoid much boiler 
plate code, and even take care of scenarios where the ExclusionStrategy would 
not work. 

For example, let's say that we have a "Project" java object, that have a 
"getTasks()" and each Task has the "getProject()"

If I want to serialize, a Project and send it to the wire, I would just need 
the Project info, and the .tasks of all the task, but I would not want to 
re-serialize the project for each individual Task obviously. 

Now, sometime, I might just want to serialize a particular task, and in this 
case, I might want to get the Project back. 

And even to go further, when I serialize a single task, I might want the Task, 
and the .project properties, but without the .project.tasks. I then that this 
last case should be handle with the ExclusionStrategy, but it would be nice to 
have a smooth API to handle this case, with the east amount of Type specific 
coding. 

Note: This is an "enhancement" not an issue, but I was not sure how to set this 
up. 

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jeremy.c...@gmail.com on 28 Oct 2013 at 5:58