[NIFI-12480] Improve handling of embedded JSON records

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 2.0.0-M2
• Component/s: Core Framework, Extensions
• Assignee: Mark Payne
• Reporter: Mark Payne
• Created: 06/Dec/23 15:14
• Updated: 24/Apr/24 12:38
• Resolved: 18/Dec/23 14:29

Description

It proves to be difficult to treat embedded JSON elements as Strings. There are times when this is necessary, such as when pushing to a database that declares a field of type JSON or interacting with a web service that expects incoming JSON as a String. However, there's no easy way to do this in NiFi today.

Instead, what typically happens is that the Record gets converted to a String via a call to toString() and that produces something like MapRecord[name=John Doe, color=blue], which is not helpful.

However, when a JSON Reader is used, we already have a JSON representation of the Record in the record's SerializedForm. When toString() is called, we should always use the SerializedForm of a Record, if it is available and only fall back to the given version.

Issue Links

• relates to: NIFI-13090 Backport Improve handling of embedded JSON records
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #8132