Exclusion of inner field of the same type does not work

[wagnerfrancisco]

It's better to explain with this example:

Given an object of type User that has an attribute also of type User:

class User {
   String name;
   User user;
}

If I try to remove not directly the user attribute, but the user of the inner user, the generated json does not have any references to user. For instance:

result(json()).withoutRoot().from(user).exclude("user.user").serialize();

I expected to have something like:

{ "name": "Wagner", "user": {} }

But I actually have:

{ "name": "Wagner" }

Vraptor removes any references to user, not just the requested one.

[lucascs]

I think the intended exclusion is just .exclude("user"), right?

[wagnerfrancisco]

No. Actually my goal was to exclude just the "user of the user". I have this:

User a = new User();
User b = new User();
b.setUser(a);
User c = new User();
c.setUser(b);

If I try to serialize "user c", in recursive mode, it would serialize the information of "user b" and indirectly of "user a" too. If I want to remove the information just of the "user a", I think it's impossible.

I just had a look at ExclusionStrategy interface of Gson, but apparently there isn't enough context there to do this kind of exclusion. Maybe it's better to do this directly in the app.