title: Partial response in Spring MVC
body: <p>Our RESTful application need to support 'partial responses' to limit bandwith.
  By this I mean that the REST client tells the URI service which fields of the resource it is interested in.</p>
  
  <p>For instance: api/v1/users/123/fields=firstName,lastName,birthDate</p>
  
  <p>We're using Jackson parser to convert our DTO's to a JSON structure.
  The problem is that we cannot tell at runtime to 'skip' some properties.
  We should need to create a class at runtime with a variable amount of properties to accomplish this. But I don't think this is possible in Java, it is a static language after all.</p>
  
  <p>While searching the internet we found some semi-solutions by just returning a java.util.Map containing the requested properties or filtering out properties by the Jackson parser.
  Especially the latter seems a 'hacking solution' to me. It seems that Spring MVC doesn't provide an out-of-the-box solution for this issue...</p>
  
  <p>Is there any alternative in the Java world we can use to solve this issue?</p>