Fetch related entities as Base Type - json

Question

I'm currently trying to setup a database – using Java only. Given this simple class that might appear in the average social network app:
#Entity
class User {
#Id
private String email;
private String name;
private String otherInfo;
#ManyToMany
private List<User> contacts;
}
When the user logs in, he should receive the basic information and the list of contacts with their basic info, but not their contacts. To reduce the amount of boiler-plate code, I want to use a standard solution like Gson. However, even with lazy fetch the whole user is loaded on gson.toJson(user).
Therefore I thought of extracting the basic infos into a base class BasicUser and changing the contacts to List<BasicUser>. Now I only need to somehow circumwent the discriminator column when I fetch the contacts – of course they are all saved as complete users on the server. Unfortunately, I don't know how to archieve that. Any ideas?

Answer 1

If you need to get only part of the entity you can use projections. In your case it can be, for example, like this:
public interface BaseUser {
String getEmail();
String getName();
String getOtherInfo();
}
public interface UserRepo extends JpaRepository <User, String> {
List<BaseUser> findAllBy();
}

Answer 2

Using Jackson for serialization, the problem can be solved without writing custom serialization code. BasicUser contains the getters of the attributes, I want to serialize:
public interface BasicUser {
String getEmail();
String getFirstName();
String getLastName();
}
With a single annotation the contacts attribute is interpreted as a list of BasicUsers:
#Entity
public class User implements BasicUser {
#Id
private String email;
private String firstName;
private String lastName;
#ManyToMany
#JsonSerialize(contentAs = BasicUser.class)
private List<User> contacts = new ArrayList<>();
// ... implemented getters
}

Answer 3

You shouldn't have to modify your domain model just to accomodate a serialization library.
If you only want certain fields of a collection to be exposed to JSON, you could use Jackson with #JsonView (see here: How to serialize using #Jsonview with nested objects) not sure if Gson provides a similar feature as I have never used it extensively.