Support JWTCreator.Builder to accept Json values

[andrewrigas]

I am trying to write a Scala library which basically enhance the functionality on top of auth0/java-jwt library. The problem I need to address is to be able to convert scala types via the encoders in java types, which is not really easy to do because you can have nested types. It will be nice to have an api that would accept a json directly and make some checks that the json passed was in a valid structure for payload and header.

Ideal solution is to be able to expose those 2 functions illustrated below:

public Builder withHeader(String headerClaimsJson) 

public Builder withPayload(String payloadClaimsJson)

[jimmyjames]

👋 @andrewrigas - I don't think this is something we can reasonably support, as we need to ensure the types/values are of our supported serializable types, and then convert them to a map of string->object. Parsing apart raw JSON strings is something that the client can do and then use existing APIs including the withPayload(Map<String, ?> payloadClaims) method.

[andrewrigas]

@jimmyjames - Not sure exactly why do you need to convert it back to Map<String, Object>? If for example a client passed a valid JSON string structure, then you could convert the rest of the claims to JSON string and merge. The problem with passing a Map into the withPayload(Map<String,?> payloadClaims) is that I need to provide the map with a key.

Therefore, the JSON will look like this:

 {
   "issuer": "foo",
   "subject": "bar",
   "key": {
       "name": "Sam",
       "age": 18
   }
 }

Where what I want to achieve is having the client claims in the payload like the example below:

{
   "issuer": "foo",
   "subject": "bar",
   "name": "Sam",
   "age": 18
}

[jimmyjames]

Where what I want to achieve is having the client claims in the payload like the example below:

I may be missing something - why can't you just use name and age as first-level keys in the map passed to withPayload(Map<String,?> payloadClaims)?

[andrewrigas]

I may be missing something - why can't you just use name and age as first-level keys in the map passed to withPayload(Map<String,?> payloadClaims)?

My example probably is not that accurate, but as I mentioned at the beginning, I want to create a Scala library where people could use it by writing native Scala code to interact with auth0/java-jwt. There for I need to expose an API that translates Scala Map with nested Scala Objects, that would be cost effective though because, when users pass their Scala Map the library needs to take care of translating all objects including the nested one in the Java library. As far as I am aware the auth0/java-jwt supports java.util.Map<String, java.util.Map<String, java.util.List>, in such example it will be inefficient to have such a translation. Therefore the auth0/java-jwt API's should provide a function to be able to get a Json Object or String and merge it with the rest of the claims to be decoupled from the language and be able to use it in other JVM languages.

[jimmyjames]

Would something like this work? I think we could add a new method that accepts a JSON string representing the payload, and then delegate to the withPayload(Map claims) method to run the existing validation.

public Builder withPayload(String payloadJSON) {
        try {
            Map<String, ?> claims = mapper.readValue(payloadJSON, Map.class);
            return withPayload(claims);
        } catch (JsonProcessingException e) {
            // TODO what exception to throw?
            throw new IllegalArgumentException("Invalid payload JSON", e);
        }
}

[andrewrigas]

I re-opened the PR: #643

[jimmyjames]

Fixed with #643 - we're targeting a new release with this change by end of week.