YAML to List of Objects in Spring Boot

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

1. Overview

In this short tutorial, we’re going to have a closer look at how to map a YAML list into a List in Spring Boot.

We’ll start with some background on how to define lists in YAML.

Then we’ll dig deeper to see how to bind YAML lists to Lists of objects.

2. Quick Recap About Lists in YAML

In short, YAML is a human-readable data serialization standard that provides a concise and clear way to write configuration files. The good thing about YAML is the fact that it supports multiple data types such as Lists, Maps and scalar types.

The elements in a YAML list are defined using the “-” character, and they all share the same indentation level:

yamlconfig:
  list:
    - item1
    - item2
    - item3
    - item4

As a comparison, the properties-based equivalent uses indices:

yamlconfig.list[0]=item1
yamlconfig.list[1]=item2
yamlconfig.list[2]=item3
yamlconfig.list[3]=item4

For more examples, feel free to take a look at our article on how to define lists and maps using YAML and properties files.

As a matter of fact, the hierarchical nature of YAML significantly enhances readability compared to properties files. Another interesting feature of YAML is the possibility to define different properties for different Spring profiles. Starting with Boot version 2.4.0, this is also possible for properties files.

It’s worth mentioning that Spring Boot provides out-of-the-box support for YAML configuration. By design, Spring Boot loads configuration properties from application.yml at startup without any extra work.

3. Binding a YAML List to a Simple List of Objects

Spring Boot provides the @ConfigurationProperties annotation to simplify the logic of mapping external configuration data into an object model.

In this section, we’ll be using @ConfigurationProperties to bind a YAML list into a List<Object>.

We start by defining a simple list in application.yml:

application:
  profiles:
    - dev
    - test
    - prod
    - 1
    - 2

Then we’ll create a simple ApplicationProps POJO to hold the logic of binding our YAML list to a List of objects:

@Component
@ConfigurationProperties(prefix = "application")
public class ApplicationProps {

    private List<Object> profiles;
    
    // getter and setter

}

The ApplicationProps class needs to be decorated with @ConfigurationProperties to express the intention of mapping all the YAML properties with the specified prefix to an object of ApplicationProps.

To bind the profiles list, we just need to define a field of type List, and the @ConfigurationProperties annotation will take care of the rest.

Notice that we register the ApplicationProps class as a normal Spring bean using @Component. As a result, we can inject it into other classes in the same way as any other Spring bean.

Finally, we inject the ApplicationProps bean into a test class and verify if our profiles YAML list is correctly injected as a List<Object>:

@ExtendWith(SpringExtension.class)
@ContextConfiguration(initializers = ConfigDataApplicationContextInitializer.class)
@EnableConfigurationProperties(value = ApplicationProps.class)
class YamlSimpleListUnitTest {
 
    @Autowired
    private ApplicationProps applicationProps;
 
    @Test
    public void whenYamlList_thenLoadSimpleList() {
        assertThat(applicationProps.getProfiles().get(0)).isEqualTo("dev");
        assertThat(applicationProps.getProfiles().get(4).getClass()).isEqualTo(Integer.class);
        assertThat(applicationProps.getProfiles().size()).isEqualTo(5);
    }
}

4. Binding YAML Lists to Complex Lists

Now let’s dive deeper and see how to inject nested YAML lists into complex structured Lists.

First, let’s add some nested lists to application.yml:

application:
  // ...
  props: 
    -
      name: YamlList
      url: http://yamllist.dev
      description: Mapping list in Yaml to list of objects in Spring Boot
    -
      ip: 10.10.10.10
      port: 8091
    -
      email: [email protected]
      contact: http://yamllist.dev/contact
  users:
    -
      username: admin
      password: admin@10@
      roles:
        - READ
        - WRITE
        - VIEW
        - DELETE
    -
      username: guest
      password: guest@01
      roles:
        - VIEW

In this example, we’re going to bind the props property to a List<Map<String, Object>>. Similarly, we’ll map users into a List of User objects.

Since each element of the props entry holds different keys, we can inject it as a List of Maps. Be sure to check out our article on how to inject a map from a YAML file in Spring Boot.

However, in the case of users, all items share the same keys, so to simplify its mapping, we may need to create a dedicated User class to encapsulate the keys as fields:

public class ApplicationProps {
    
    // ...
	
    private List<Map<String, Object>> props;
    private List<User> users;
    
    // getters and setters

    public static class User {

        private String username;
        private String password;
        private List<String> roles;

        // getters and setters

    }
}

Now we verify that our nested YAML lists are properly mapped:

@ExtendWith(SpringExtension.class)
@ContextConfiguration(initializers = ConfigDataApplicationContextInitializer.class)
@EnableConfigurationProperties(value = ApplicationProps.class)
class YamlComplexListsUnitTest {
 
    @Autowired
    private ApplicationProps applicationProps;
 
    @Test
    public void whenYamlNestedLists_thenLoadComplexLists() {
        assertThat(applicationProps.getUsers().get(0).getPassword()).isEqualTo("admin@10@");
        assertThat(applicationProps.getProps().get(0).get("name")).isEqualTo("YamlList");
        assertThat(applicationProps.getProps().get(1).get("port").getClass()).isEqualTo(Integer.class);
    }
	
}

5. Conclusion

In this article, we learned how to map YAML lists into Java Lists.

We also checked how to bind complex lists to custom POJOs.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.