How to Ignore Null Fields with Jackson in Java

In this short tutorial, you'll learn how to use the Jackson's @JsonInclude annotation to ignore null fields while serializing a Java Object to its JSON representation.

By default, Jackson includes null fields when we serialize a Java Object to its JSON representation. For a deeper understanding, let us create a simple User class:

public class User {

    public String name;
    public String email;
    private String[] roles;
    private boolean admin;

    public User() {
    }

    public User(String name, String email, String[] roles, boolean admin) {
        this.name = name;
        this.email = email;
        this.roles = roles;
        this.admin = admin;
    }

    // getters and setters, toString() .... (omitted for brevity)
}

Now let us create an instance of User and then try to convert it into a JSON string:

try {
    // create user object
    User user = new User("John Doe", null, null, true);

    // convert user object to JSON
    String json = new ObjectMapper().writeValueAsString(user);

    // print JSON string
    System.out.println(json);

} catch (Exception ex) {
    ex.printStackTrace();
}

As you can see above, we set the email and roles fields to null while creating a new user object. Here is the JSON string generated by the above code:

{"name":"John Doe","email":null,"roles":null,"admin":true}

To remove null fields from the generated JSON, just put @JsonInclude on the class level, field level, or globally.

Ignore Null Fields on Class Level

To ignore all null fields for a specific class, put the @JsonInclude annotation on top of the class name:

@JsonInclude(JsonInclude.Include.NON_NULL)
public class User {
    // ...
}

Now, if you run the above example code, you should see that no null fields are a part of the final JSON output:

{"name":"John Doe","admin":true}

Ignore Null Fields on Field Level

You can even specify the @JsonInclude annotation on the field level for more granular control:

public class User {

    public String name;
    @JsonInclude(JsonInclude.Include.NON_NULL)
    public String email;
    @JsonInclude(JsonInclude.Include.NON_NULL)
    private String[] roles;
    private boolean admin;

    // ....
}

Ignore Null Fields Globally

Jackson also allows us to configure null fields behavior globally on the ObjectMapper instance, as shown below:

try {
    // create user object
    User user = new User("John Doe", null, null, true);

    // create object mapper instance
    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

    // configure null fields behavior
    mapper.setSerializationInclusion(JsonInclude.Include.NON_NULL);

    // convert user object to JSON
    String json = mapper.writeValueAsString(user);

    // print JSON string
    System.out.println(json);

} catch (Exception ex) {
    ex.printStackTrace();
}

Here is the final JSON generated by the above example:

{"name":"John Doe","admin":true}

For more Jackson examples, check out the How to read and write JSON using Jackson in Java tutorial.

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