Using a Jackson attribute to accumulate state as a byproduct of serialization - jackson

Question

Here's my scenario:
I have a deep compositional tree of POJOs from various classes. I need to write a utility that can dynamically process this tree without having a baked in understanding of the class/composition structure
Some properties in my POJOs are annotated with a custom annotation #PIIData("phone-number") that declares that the property may contain PII, and optionally what kind of PII (e.g. phone number)
As a byproduct of serializing the root object, I'd like to accumulate a registry of PII locations based on their JSON path
Desired data structure:
path
type
household.primaryEmail
email-address
household.members[0].cellNumber
phone-number
household.members[0].firstName
first-name
household.members[1].cellNumber
phone-number
I don't care about the specific pathing/location language used (JSON Pointer, Json Path).
I could achieve this with some reflection and maintenance of my own path, but it feels like something I should be able to do with Jackson since it's already doing the traversal. I'm pretty sure that using Jackson's attributes feature is the right way to attach my object that will accumulate the data structure. However, I can't figure out a way to get at the path at runtime. Here's my current Scala attempt (hackily?) built on top of a filter that is applied to all objects through a mixin:
object Test {
#JsonFilter("pii")
class PiiMixin {
}
class PiiAccumulator {
val state = mutable.ArrayBuffer[String]()
def accumulate(test: String): Unit = state += test
}
def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
val filter = new SimpleBeanPropertyFilter() {
override def serializeAsField(pojo: Any, jgen: JsonGenerator, provider: SerializerProvider, writer: PropertyWriter): Unit = {
if (writer.getAnnotation(classOf[PiiData]) != null) {
provider.getAttribute("pii-accumulator").asInstanceOf[PiiAccumulator].accumulate(writer.getFullName.toString)
}
super.serializeAsField(pojo, jgen, provider, writer)
}
override def include(writer: BeanPropertyWriter): Boolean = true
override def include(writer: PropertyWriter): Boolean = true
}
val provider = new SimpleFilterProvider().addFilter("pii", filter)
val mapper = new ObjectMapper()
mapper.addMixIn(classOf[Object], classOf[PiiMixin])
val accum = new PiiAccumulator()
mapper.writer(provider)
.withAttributes("pii-accumulator", accum)
.writeValueAsString(null) // Pass in any arbitrary object here
}
}
This code has enabled me to dynamically buffer up a list of property names that contain PII, but I can't figure out how to get their locations within the resulting JSON doc. Perhaps the Jackson architecture somehow precludes knowing that at runtime. Is there some other place I can hook in to do something like this, perhaps while converting to a JsonNode?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Okay, found it. You can access the recursive path/location during serialization via JsonGenerator.getOutputContext.pathAsPointer(). So by changing my code above to the following:
if (writer.getAnnotation(classOf[PIIData]) != null) {
provider.getAttribute("pii").asInstanceOf[PiiAccumulator]
.accumulate(jgen.getOutputContext.pathAsPointer().toString + "/" + writer.getName)
}
I'm able to dynamically buffer a list of special locations in the resulting JSON document for further dynamic processing.