I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I actually ran into this as well a few months back. All of the available solutions weren't very appealing to me (mixins? ugh!), so I ended up creating a new library to make this process cleaner. It's available here if anyone would like to try it out: https://github.com/monitorjbl/spring-json-view.

The basic usage is pretty simple, you use the JsonView object in your controller methods like so:

import com.monitorjbl.json.JsonView; import static com.monitorjbl.json.Match.match;

@RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/myObject") @ResponseBody public void getMyObjects() { //get a list of the objects List<MyObject> list = myObjectService.list(); //exclude expensive field JsonView.with(list).onClass(MyObject.class, match().exclude("contains")); } 

You can also use it outside of Spring:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper; import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.module.SimpleModule; import static com.monitorjbl.json.Match.match; ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper(); SimpleModule module = new SimpleModule(); module.addSerializer(JsonView.class, new JsonViewSerializer()); mapper.registerModule(module); mapper.writeValueAsString(JsonView.with(list) .onClass(MyObject.class, match() .exclude("contains")) .onClass(MySmallObject.class, match() .exclude("id")); 

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but I actually ran into this as well a few months back. All of the available solutions weren't very appealing to me (mixins? ugh!), so I ended up creating a new library to make this process cleaner. It's available here if anyone would like to try it out: https://github.com/monitorjbl/spring-json-view.

The basic usage is pretty simple, you use the JsonView object in your controller methods like so:

import com.monitorjbl.json.JsonView; import static com.monitorjbl.json.Match.match; @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/myObject") @ResponseBody public void getMyObjects() { //get a list of the objects List<MyObject> list = myObjectService.list(); //exclude expensive field JsonView.with(list).onClass(MyObject.class, match().exclude("contains")); } 

You can also use it outside of Spring:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper; import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.module.SimpleModule; import static com.monitorjbl.json.Match.match; ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper(); SimpleModule module = new SimpleModule(); module.addSerializer(JsonView.class, new JsonViewSerializer()); mapper.registerModule(module); mapper.writeValueAsString(JsonView.with(list) .onClass(MyObject.class, match() .exclude("contains")) .onClass(MySmallObject.class, match() .exclude("id"));