VPack Stack Overflow

[JPatrick Davenport]

Hello,

I have an object that points to itself. This appears to cause the serialize to wig out (infinitely recurse). Is there some flag to prevent this that I over looked?

Thanks,
JPD

[mpv1989]

Hello,

you can use the annotation `Expose` on that field and set `serialize` and `deserialize` to `false` to ignore the field for serialization.

You can find an example in the docs.

Best,

Mark

[JPatrick Davenport]

I need the field to point to itself. Java serialization gets around this issue by identifying the object in question. When it sees that object again, it knows to not serialize it, but use the instance it already has. I'm not sure how this could translate into a JSON based format.

[mpv1989]

I see no generic and clean way to handle this with json. I would recommend the workaround with a custom `VPackDeserializer` for the self pointing class. This doesn't need any additional information stored in the document.

  public static class SelfPointingTestEntity {
    private String foo;
    private SelfPointingTestEntity self;


    public SelfPointingTestEntity() {
      super();
    }
  }


  final ArangoDB.Builder builder = new ArangoDB.Builder().registerDeserializer(SelfPointingTestEntity.class,
    new VPackDeserializer<SelfPointingTestEntity>() {
      @Override
      public SelfPointingTestEntity deserialize(
        final VPackSlice parent,
        final VPackSlice vpack,
        final VPackDeserializationContext context) throws VPackException {
        final SelfPointingTestEntity entity = new SelfPointingTestEntity();
        entity.foo = vpack.get("foo").getAsString();
        entity.self = entity;
        return entity;
      }
    });