title: Parsing JSON with a value with dynamic type (either string or object) with Jackson's ObjectMapper
body: <p>I am new to Jackson and I am having some problems determining the best way to deal with processing JSON files that are dynamic in nature. I know I could solve the issue with the streaming or tree API, but this would involve a lot of code which will not be easily maintained. For example, take the following two json files:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{
     something: "somethingValue"
     somethingelse: "anotherValue"
     url: "http://something.com"
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and</p>
  
  <pre><code>{
     something: "somethingValue"
     somethingelse: "anotherValue"
     url: {
             service1: [
                "http://something.com",
                "https://something.com" ],
             service2: [
                "http://something2.com",
                "https://something2.com" ],
          }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>the default behaviour of the first json object after being parsed, should add the URL to both service1 and service2 url lists in the subclass "URL". where the second allow specifying very specific urls to each. The data object for url class I was planning on use is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>public class url {
  
     // ideally, I would use the java.net.URL instead of String
     public List&lt;String&gt; service1;    
     public List&lt;String&gt; service2;
  
     // also includes getter/setters using a fluent style
     ...
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>There would also be some other parent class which would have a parameter for URL and other first level json parameters.</p>
  
  <p>What is the best way to handle this in jackson?</p>