Using GSON Google Library in Android to Treat JSON Strings

JSON Library - GSON

We can treat a JSON string in many ways, we can use the JSON objects that Android provides us, but I think it’s interesting enough to create an article for the topic itself, so I’m going to discuss a simple and quick way to treat JSON, and it is using the GSON library. According to the GSON library web page ,

“Gson is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object.”

So it’s perfect! That’s all we need. Let’s download it and put the .jar in our project. For this example I have downloaded the 1.7.1 version of the library.

If you want to add an external .jar to your Android code, follow the next steps:

• Right click on the Android Project.
• Select “Properties”.
• Select “Java Build Path” in the left box.
• Click on the “Libraries” tab in the right box.
• Click on the button “Add external JARS…”
• Search for the .jar file you have just downloaded and select it.

Now you have the GSON library in your project, ready to be used.

If we are going to convert a JSON string to a Java object, we need to create a class to hold the information, the class created needs to have the same number and name of arguments as the JSON Object. Let’s see the example.

Our JSON string is going to be as follows:

{“id”:“20”,“text”:" Hi!BrightHub",“date”:“2011-05-14 23:02:54”}, {“id”:“21”, “text”:" Hi!BrightHub Again" , “date”:" 2011-05-15 23:02:54"}, ….

The attributes names in our class have to be:

id, text and date.

So we create a class with these attributes, the getters and setter methods, if you want. I will call this class “JsonClass”.

To convert the JSON stream into a list of objects we have to do the following:

Type collectionType = new TypeToken<List>(){}.getType();

List<JsonClass> jsonList = new Gson().fromJson(response, collectionType);

That’s all. With this piece of code, we get the response from the server and convert it to a list of objects.

We need to tell the GSON library what type of objects are going to be used to hold the JSON, we use the TypeToken for that. And then with the Gson().fromJson() method we make the conversion.

In the source code provided at the end of the article the class I use is “Alertas” and the JSON has the following structure:

{“alertid”:“36”,“alerttext”:“test post”,“alertdate”:“2010-08-20 03:24:42”}

You can check in the repository, it’s the same as I have done above.

Great, so we retrieved the information from the server and we convert the JSON string into a list of known objects… all this will take some time to be accomplished… What do we do? Do we place all the processes in the main UI thread? Do we create a background process for it? In the next article we will talk about this.

References

• Google-GSON, https://code.google.com/p/google-gson/
• JSON, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
• Android source code Project, https://github.com/jbeerdev/BrightHubCode

This post is part of the series: Android Code to Access the Web

With this series of articles I will show Android developers a code example to connect your Android device to the Internet, retrieve data from it and treat that information. Using the right background process in Android is explained too.

1. Android App Development: How to Access the Internet and Retrieve Info with Your App
2. Android Development: GSON library and JSON Strings
3. Android Development: Background Process for a Heavy Task