Converting JSON to Models

Overview

This guide describes the process of converting JSON data retrieved from a network request and converting that data to simple Model objects. This approach will be compatible with nearly any basic data-driven application and fits well with any ORM solution for persistence such as ActiveAndroid or SugarORM that may be introduced.

For this guide, we will be using the Yelp API as the example. The goal of this guide is to perform a Yelp API Search and then process the results into Java objects which we can then use to populate information within our application.

The model in this case is Business and for our application, let's suppose we just need the name, phone, and image of the business which are all provided by the Search API.

Fetching JSON Results

The first step in retrieving any API-based model data is to execute a network request to retrieve the JSON response that represents the underlying data that we want to use. In this case, we want to execute a request to http://api.yelp.com/v2/search?term=food&location=San+Francisco and then this will return us a JSON dictionary that looks like:

{
  "businesses": [
    {
      "id": "yelp-tropisueno",
      "name" : "Tropisueno",
      "display_phone": "+1-415-908-3801",
      "image_url": "http://s3-media2.ak.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/7DIHu8a0AHhw-BffrDIxPA/ms.jpg",
      ...
    }
  ] 
}