Hey guys, Is it possible to tell retrofit to ignore certain fields of an object when sending the obj...

# android

[Ofir Bar]

Hey guys,
Is it possible to tell retrofit to ignore certain fields of an object when sending the object over the network?







We have a request object Profession that we send to our backend using Retrofit.

data class Profession (
	@SerializedName("activeSince") var activeSince : Long?,
	@SerializedName("name") var businessName : String?,
	@SerializedName("description") var businessDescription : String?,
	@SerializedName("licenseImageUrl") var licenseImageUrl : String?
)

Sometimes we send the entire object, but other times, I prefer to only send specific fields (for example, only the businessDescription and businessName ).

Is it possible to tell retrofit to not include the other 2 fields in the network request? (activeSince and licenseImageUrl).

Note: I can’t send activeSince and licenseImageUrl as null. Our backend will send me back errors if I attempt to do that (edited)

[Oscar Sequeiros]

There is an annotation in Kotlin (keyword in Java) @Transient

[Ofir Bar]

Using Transient will cause me to always not serialize/deserealize a field.

I want to have the option to sometimes serialize it and sometimes not.
Is it possible?

[dino9]

@SerializedName("activeSince") var activeSince : Long? = null,
@SerializedName("licenseImageUrl") var licenseImageUrl : String? = null,

Can you try set null?

[Ofir Bar]

I can, but the backend does not allow receiving null values.

Is there a way to not include the field in JSON at all?

[Andi Beqiri]

if value is null I thing gson default to not serializing them

[Javier Troconis]

You can configure if you want to ignore nulls when performing the serialization as Andi mentioned

[Ofir Bar]

@Javier Troconis Can you please give an example?
Where you can configure that?

[Javier Troconis]

Using the GsonBuilder, but as it has been said the default behavior is to ignore null (which seems to be what you want). If you wanted to include nulls you would have to use serializeNulls() on the builder

[toban]

I looked for this as well and found https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization/issues/195.

As proposed in that thread, a possible workaround is to set encodeDefaults = false in your JsonCofiguration.

[Ofir Bar]

Thank you @toban!