JsonInclude.Include.CUSTOM define criteria on seperate field

[oasesoftware]

I'm wondering nobody else has the feature request that the JsonInclude.Include.CUSTOM annotation not only is able to validate the current value the annotation is set on but on another field of the same class.
My use case is, that I have a boolean field "arrested" which allways should be marshalled. Then there is a field "arrestedIndex" which is an Integer field. This only should be marshalled when "arrested" is set to "TRUE" regardless what the content of "arrestedIndex" is.
With the current Include.NON_EMPTY or Include.NON_NULL I only can tell the system to marshall the field depending on these rules.
With the Include.CUSTOM annotation I could filter on other values too, but I will not be able to depend the decision whether to marshall the actual field depending on another field.
This possibility would boost up the Include.CUSTOM validation system. What do you think?
Or am I not aware of an allready existing feature, which handles this?

[cowtowncoder]

I can see the need for co-constraints, so at very general level it would be nice to support in some form.

But I suspect this goes beyond limits of @JsonInclude set up which is more limited both via its structure and more importantly, processing model where custom handlers cannot really be passed contextual information about definitions, or, as importantly, actual values. And in fact the real challenge comes from the fact jackson-databind keeps minimal state around so there is no logical data model stored to be accessed by other properties (except for some buffering needed for @JsonCreator and so on).

Jackson does not current provide anything out-of-the-box for constraints that span multiple properties, at least.

But it is definitely possible (and maybe even likely) that some developers have built things like you describe, so maybe someone could share how they want about this?

[oasesoftware]

Thank you for your reply, and also thank you for even considering this opportunity. In the meantime I'm searching for a solution how to handle this problem, with the given functionality.