Prevent GSON from serializing JSON string

[TheXL]

I'm new to gson, and have newby question which I have not found an answer to, so please bear with me. StackOverflow and google were not my friend :(

I have a java class "User", and one of its properties, "externalProfile" is a Java String containing already serialized JSON. When gson serializes the User object, it will treat externalProfile as primitive and thus escaping the JSON adding extra slashes etc. I want gson to leave the string alone, just using it "as is", because it is already valid and usable JSON.

To distinguish the JSON string, I created a simple class called JSONString, and I've tried using reader/writers, registerTypeAdapter, but nothing works. Can you help me out?

public class User {
    private JSONString externalProfile;
}

public final class JSONString {
    private String simpleString;
    public JSONString(String simpleString) { this.simpleString = simpleString; }
}

public customJsonBuilder(Object object) {
    GsonBuilder builder = new GsonBuilder();
        builder.registerTypeAdapter(GregorianCalendar.class, new JsonSerializer<GregorianCalendar>() {
            public JsonElement serialize(GregorianCalendar src, Type type, JsonSerializationContext context) {
                if (src == null) {
                    return null;
                }
                return new JsonPrimitive(new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss").format(src.getTime()));
            }
        });
        Gson gson = builder.create();
        return gson.toJson(object);
}

BTW: I post this for the second time, because the first time it didn;t work for some reason. Hop this doesn't double my entry.

[TheXL]

As en example, the externalProfile will hold (as String value):

  

  {"profile":{"registrationNumber": 11111}}

After I store it as JSONString in the User object, and we convert the user object to JSON:

    User user = new User();
    user.setExternalProfile(new JSONString(externalProfile)),  
    String json = customJsonBuilder(user);

json will hold something like:

    {\"profile\":{\"registrationNumber\": 11111}}

So, the externalProfile JSONString is serialized by gson as String primitive, adding the extra slashes in front of the doublequotes.
I want gson to leave this JSONString as is, because it already is usable JSON.
I'm looking for a type adapter / reader-writer to do this, but I can't get it to work.

[TheXL]

As suggested by AlexisC at  Stack Overflow, the simples way is to first convert the JSON String to gson's native JsonObject, and then serialize it again:

new Gson().fromJson(externalProfile, JsonObject.class)

So simple, I don;t understand how I've missed it