Implementing an "error surrogate subtype"?

[xpdota]

I have a fairly typical implementation:

• I have a "ParentType" (interface or abstract class)
• I have several subtypes of ParentType
• I am using @JsonTypeInfo to add a "type" property to differentiate between different types
• ParentType is typically, but not always found in a List<ParentType>.

Everything so far works fine, but what I want to add is:

• If deserialization of a particular item fails, replace it with a "FailedType" (still a subtype of ParentType) that captures either the JsonNode or just a string representation of the JSON that failed to deserialize.
• This can be shown to the user in a list of items alongside the items that successfully deserialized, allowing the user to see the JSON that failed to deserialize.
• I need to be able to persist the bad items along with the good items, so that the user can fix the issues later, or correct the issue causing it to not deserialize correctly (e.g. missing something on the classpath).

My first thought was to use a DeserializationProblemHandler, however, this really only catches common issues at the same level. That is, if the issue occurs in a nested object, it's not of much help. I want it to be a catch-all for anything that happens below this level (though there is a possibility of having a ParentType within another ParentType, in which case I would want it to be caught by the deepest ParentType).

I tried playing around with a custom ValueDeserializer, or extending StdDeserializer, but the problem is that no matter what I tried, any attempt to get it to perform the "normal" deserialization logic (so that I can catch an error) would result in a stack overflow, as my custom deserializer would effectively just call itself. I also tried things with createContextual() to no avail (findRootValueDeserializer/findContextualValueDeserializer produces the stack overflow instead). I haven't been able to make this work on Jackson 2 nor 3. I also played around with custom TypeIdResolvers, but this also lead to either stack overflows, or other breakages.

What I'm looking for is:

• Is this possible at all, or should I feature request this?
• Am I using the right approach, or is there a better way to do this?

Here is an example of what I asm trying to accomplish. The two serialization tests work fine, but none of the deserialization test cases work - they all stack overflow: https://gist.github.com/xpdota/83e9c1f9d9a36ba8b1576f40ba489e27

Thank you for any help.

[xpdota]

Okay, I think I mostly figured it out, but there's a few corner cases that it doesn't work as well for. I extended BeanDeserializer, and then created a module that uses modifyDeserializer to add my custom deserializer.

The two corner cases that I'm not quite happy with are:

• If you try deserialize directly into one of your "success" subtypes (i.e. they are your root type), then it will result in a ClassCastException because it will try to deserialize into Failed which is not assignable to a different concrete subtype.
• If you try to serialize a List<Object> with ParentType entries (or any subclass), it will omit type information, but this is a general Jackson behavior and not specific to this.

https://gist.github.com/xpdota/d242294a8499d69e28590eb9dbe842af