Serializing locale with underscore, not standard hyphen

[akoshman]

There were an issue with deserializing locales #1344

But there is still a problem that during serialization Jackson is executing toString() method for locale. According to the official javadoc, toString() must be used for debug purposes. I think it is better to use toLanguageTag() for the serialization since it produces locale represenation with a hyphen as a delimiter:

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html

[cowtowncoder]

Ok that sounds plausible I guess.

My main concern here is the backwards compatibility, as usual; if change can be made in a compatible way

[cowtowncoder]

For what it is worth, there is currently no dedicated serializer for Locale; it does use default ToStringSerializer.

[michaelkrog]

I experience this is an issue as well in our setup with mixed .NET and Java services.

.NET default is to use a Hyphen and there some of our services expect a Hyphen. Developing a Java-client against these services requires a custom serializer.

[paolobazzi]

+1 for solving this issue. As workaround we added a custom implementation of the ToStringSerializer using Locale.toLanguageTag()

Could Backward-compatibility be added using a new serialization property (e.g. USE_LOCALE_TO_STRING_SERIALIZATION) or a JsonFormat annotation?

[cowtowncoder]

@paolobazzi At this point I think the fix needs to go in 3.0, for better or worse. Features are bit coarse-grained for this (I know there are a few datatype-specific ones, but ideally would try to avoid that); and they'd need to go in a new minor version anyway. But 2.9 is likely the last 2.x version.

[paolobazzi]

Thanks for solving this issue!
Is there an idea when Release 3.0 will be available?

Cheers, Paolo

[cowtowncoder]

@paolobazzi No idea unfortunately at this point. Big changes still going on so we are far from even the first pre-release version. At earlier, if I had to guess, July/August; but might be closer to end of 2018.

[paolobazzi]

Thanks for your information!