[Geoserver-devel] Upgrade Jettison dependency version

Due to a bug in Jettison 1.0.1, serializing and deserializing
collections is broken <http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/JETTISON-48&gt;

Here's a test that demonstrates the issue:

package org.geoserver.rest.format;
...
public class ReflectiveJSONFormatTest extends TestCase {

    @SuppressWarnings({ "unchecked", "rawtypes" })
    public void testFoo() throws Exception {

        ReflectiveJSONFormat format = new ReflectiveJSONFormat();

        Foo foo = new Foo("list", 2, 3.0, new
ArrayList(Arrays.asList(1L, 2.5D)));

        ByteArrayOutputStream output = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        format.write(foo, output);

        Object read = format.read(new
ByteArrayInputStream(output.toByteArray()));

        assertTrue(read instanceof Foo);
        Foo foo2 = (Foo) read;
        assertEquals(foo.getList(), foo2.getList());
        assertEquals(foo.getProp1(), foo2.getProp1());
        assertEquals(foo.getProp2(), foo2.getProp2());
        assertEquals(foo.getProp3(), foo2.getProp3());
    }
}

The test fails at the first assert. (Have added a list property to the
org.geoserver.rest.Foo test object).

The generated JSON with the current Jettison version is
Jettison 1.0.1:
{"org.geoserver.rest.Foo":{"list":{"int":[1],"double":2.5},"prop1":"list","prop2":2,"prop3":3}}

The generated JSON with Jettison 1.3 (latest release) is:
Jettison 1.3:
{"org.geoserver.rest.Foo":{"list":[{"int":1,"double":2.5}],"prop1":"list","prop2":2,"prop3":3}}

As you can see, the currently generated value of the "list" attribute
is not a json array as it should be, whilst the Jettison 1.3 one is.

Upgrading to Jettison 1.3 breaks some restconfig tests though, because
they're asserting the "incorrect" format is being generated.
For instance:
org.geoserver.catalog.rest.WorkspaceTest.testGetAllAsJSON
org.geoserver.catalog.rest.DataStoreTest.testGetAllAsJSON
org.geoserver.catalog.rest.CoverageStoreTest.testGetAllAsJSON
org.geoserver.catalog.rest.NamespaceTest.testGetAllAsJSON
org.geoserver.catalog.rest.WMSStoreTest.testGetAllAsJSON
org.geoserver.catalog.rest.StyleTest.testGetAllAsJSON

Take for example WorkspaceTest.testGetAllAsJSON
The GET request produces:

{"workspaces":{"workspace":[{"name":"cite","..."},{"name":"cgf","..."},{"name":"sf","..."},{"name":"gs","..."},{"name":"cdf","..."}]}}

while Jettison 1.3 produces:
{"workspaces":[{"workspace":[{"name":"cite","..."},{"name":"cgf","..."},{"name":"sf","..."},{"name":"gs","..."},{"name":"cdf","..."}]}]}

In the second case, "workspaces" is in itself an array. And that's
correct because the object being encoded is a List<WorkspaceInfo>.

So the question is, is there any chance we can upgrade to Jettison 1.3
and fix those tests? Would it be too risky a REST api breakage?
I would like to upgrade and get rid of that Jettison bug because it is
very much needed in order to work with the gwc configuration that
collection properties are properly encoded and decoded when they
contain polymorphic elements, which currently is impossible.

TIA,
Gabriel

--
Gabriel Roldan
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.