GsonProvider

The Gson provider manages a shared Gson instance and allows services and plugins to register custom JSON serialization support. This serves multiple purposes:

• JSON formatting is shared across services that use it for serialization
• Services can register custom serialization for private types (See KeybindingConfig for an example of this)
• Plugins that register custom config containers with ConfigManager can register support for their own custom types.

Registering custom serialization

The Gson provider offers methods that allows registering the following:

• TypeAdapter - For handling serialization and deserialization of a type.
• InstanceCreator - For assisting construction of types that do not provide no-arg constructors.
• JsonSerializer - For specifying serialization support only.
• JsonDeserializer - For specifying deserialization support only.

For more details on how to use each of the given types, see the Gson JavaDocs.

TypeAdapter:

gsonProvider.addTypeAdapter(ExampleType.class, new TypeAdapter<>() {
    @Override
    public void write(JsonWriter out, ExampleType value) throws IOException {
        // Manual serialization of 'value'  goes here using 'out'
    }
    @Override
    public ExampleType read(JsonReader in) throws IOException {
        // Manual deserialization of the type from 'in' goes here
        return new ExampleType(...);
    }
});

InstanceCreator:

gsonProvider.addTypeInstanceCreator(ExampleType.class, type -> new ExampleType(...));

JsonSerializer:

gsonProvider.addTypeSerializer(ExampleType.class, (src, typeOfSrc, context) -> {
    // Manual serialization of 'T src' into a 'JsonElement' return value goes here
    return new JsonObject();
});

JsonDeserializer:

gsonProvider.addTypeDeserializer(ExampleType.class, (json, typeOfT, context) -> {
    // Manual deserialization of (JsonElement json) goes here
    return new ExampleType(...);
});