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Summary: Learn how to prevent infinite recursion and StackOverflowError when including parent fields in JSON responses using Spring Boot
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How to Include Parent Field in JSON Response without Causing Infinite Recursion in Spring Boot?

Spring Boot makes it fairly straightforward to work with JSON and REST APIs. However, developers often run into the issue of infinite recursion and StackOverflowError when they try to serialize entities that have bidirectional relationships.

Consider a simple Spring Boot application where you have Parent and Child entities. The Parent entity has a collection of Child entities, and each Child has a reference back to the Parent. Here's a basic example of what these entities might look like:

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When you try to serialize the Parent entity to JSON, it recursively includes its Child entities, which then try to include the Parent entity again, creating an infinite loop and eventually leading to a StackOverflowError.

Preventing Infinite Recursion

To handle this scenario, you can use a few annotations provided by the Jackson library which Spring Boot uses for JSON serialization.

Solution 1: Using @JsonManagedReference and @JsonBackReference

The @JsonManagedReference annotation is used on the parent reference and @JsonBackReference is used on the back reference:

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Solution 2: Using @JsonIgnoreProperties

You can also use the @JsonIgnoreProperties annotation to ignore the parent reference when serializing the Child entity:

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Solution 3: Using @JsonIdentityInfo

For more complex scenarios with multiple relationships, you might want to use the @JsonIdentityInfo annotation, which uses a unique identifier for each instance and prevents infinite recursion by keeping track of already serialized instances:

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Conclusion

Infinite recursion and StackOverflowError are common issues in bidirectional relationships when serializing entities to JSON in Spring Boot. Utilizing annotations like @JsonManagedReference, @JsonBackReference, @JsonIgnoreProperties, and @JsonIdentityInfo can effectively prevent these issues. Choose the method that best fits your scenario and simplify managing JSON serialization in your Spring Boot applications.