Remove key from a Json inside a JsonObject

Question

I have JsonObject like below

{"status":"ACTIVE","accounts":{"email":"[email protected]","name":"Test"}}

How can I remove Json key "email" and its value from the JsonObject by using something like jsonObj.remove("email") in java

JsonObj.removev working for me if I need to remove status key jsonObj.remove("status")

Update

Some more background, This is for mainly testing a rest end point. In my test I created java object matching to payload with Builder pattern and then covert to Json using GsonBuilder like

import com.google.gson.GsonBuilder;
import com.google.gson.JsonObject;
public class JsonConvertor() {
public static JsonObject convertToJsonObject(Object payload) {
GsonBuilder builder = new GsonBuilder();
return (JsonObject) builder.setFieldNamingPolicy(FieldNamingPolicy.Policy).
            create().toJsonTree(payload);
}}

If I need to remove a required field I use, JsonObj.remove("key") on Json Object created by above function.

accounts is an object itself so your jsonObj should point to that object. Besides that please consider adding more information to your question since we can't know what jsonObj actually is (actual type, which library, what does it point to etc.) The more effort you put into the question the more people will be willing to help. — Thomas

Thomas Thomas · Accepted Answer · 2015-12-04T16:58:25

If Gson is like Jackson (I assume so) you'll have to first get the JsonObject "accounts" from the root object and then remove the member "email", e.g. like this:

jsonObj.getAsJsonObject("accounts").remove("email");

Alternatively - and probably the preferred way - you would map the json object to a POJO (one that has the fields "status", "accounts" and "accounts" would point to another POJO), navigate to the accounts-POJO and set "email" to null there. Then you reformat the root POJO to JSON and apply a setting that omits fields with null values.

Edit (answer to the question in the comment):

To make it short, I don't know whether there is a built-in functionality or not but it should be doable.

The problem is that if you just provide keys like email etc. you might get situations where there are multiple keys so identifying the correct one could be hard. Thus it might be better to provide the key as accounts.email and split the "key" into sub-expressions and then traverse the Json tree using the parts or convert the Json to a POJO and use some expression language (e.g. Java EL or OGNL) to traverse the POJO.

If you want to remove all properties named email you could just travers the entire json tree, check whether there is a property with that name and if so remove it.

Remove key from a Json inside a JsonObject

3 Answers