REST Assured: Deserialization and Inheritance to cater to varied Responses being returned by an API endpoint

Question

I have a situation where sometimes the response of an API is

{
    "SuccessCode": "OPERATION_SUCCESS",
    "Message": "Operation completed successfully"
}

and at times, the response is

{
    "FaultId": "User already exists",
    "fault": "FAULT_USER_ALREADY_EXISTS"
}

How do I deserialize this in a generic way which caters to the varied responses?

Answer 1

You can create two different objects that will denote the faulty and successful responses:

public class Successful {
   private String SuccessCode; // or successCode as usually done in java + annotation to map the json field
   private String Message;

   ... getters, setters ...
}

public class Faulty {
   private String FaultId;
   private String fault;
   ... getters, setters ...
}

Then, assuming, that successful responses have http status code 200, and otherwise its a fault, you can:

   Response resp  =  when().get(<SOME_URL_GOES_HERE);
   if(resp.getStatusCode () == 200) {
       Successful respSuccess = resp.body().as(Successful.class);
   } else {
       Faulty faulty = resp.body().as(Faulty.class);
   }