Converting JSONArray to normal Array

If you're using JSONObject that comes with Android its tedious to convert from User defined types to JSONObject/JSONArray then back again. There are other libraries out there that will do this transformation automatically so it's simple one or two line to decode/encode JSON.

ProductLineItem lineItem = ...;
JSONObject json = new JSONObject();
json.put( "name", lineItem.getName() );
json.put( "quantity", lineItem.getCount() );
json.put( "price", lineItem.getPrice() );
... // do this for each property in your user defined class
String jsonStr = json.toString();

This could all be encapsulated within ProductLineItem.toJSON(). Parsing is similar. I like to create a constructor that takes a JSONObject and creates the object like: ProductLineItem obj = new ProductLineItem( jsonObject ):

public class ProductLineItem {
    private String name;
    private int quantity;
    private float price;

   public MyObject( JSONObject json ) {
      name = json.getString("name");
      count = json.getInt("quantity");
      price = json.optFloat("price");
   }
}

Handling arrays is very much the same. So something like:

public class ShoppingCart {

     float totalPrice;
     List<Rebate> rebates = new ArrayList<Rebate>();
     List<ProductLineItem> lineItems = new ArrayList<ProductLineItem>();


    public ShoppingCart( JSONObject json ) {
        totalPrice = json.getFloat("totalPrice");

        for( JSONObject rebateJson : json.getArray("rebates") ) {
            rebates.add( new Rebate( rebateJson ) );
        }

        for( JSONObject productJson : json.getArray("lineItems") ) {
            lineItems.add( new ProductLineItem( productJson ) );
        }
    }

    public JSONObject toJSON() {
        JSONObject json = new JSONObject();
        json.put("totalPrice", totalPrice );

        JSONArray rebatesArray = new JSONArray();
        for( Rebate rebate : rebates ) {
            rebatesArray.put( rebate.toJSON() );
        }

        JSONArray lineItemsArray = new JSONArray();
        for( ProductLineItem lineItem : lineItems ) {
            lineItemsArray.put( lineItem.toJSON() );
        }

        json.put( "rebates", rebatesArray );
        json.put( "lineItems", lineItemsArray );

        return json;
    }
}

You can see just for a simple 2 objects this boiler plate code is quite significant. So you can continue to do this or you can use a library that handles all of this for you:

http://flexjson.sourceforge.net

// serialize
String json = new JSONSerializer().serialize( shoppingCart );
// deserialize
ShoppingCart cart = new JSONDeserializer<ShoppingCart>().deserialize( json, ShoppingCart.class );