What is the problem of circular references in JSON?
This problem occurs when you have entities that are interdependent. For example, a Book entity that contains a single or a collection of authors. The Author entity contains also a single or a collection of books. It's as A -> B -> A. Because JSON, like XML, is tree based, it can't deal with that and will throw an exception.
I faced the problem of circular reference when I started using JSON. I searched the web, there were a lot of solutions for that. But they are not accepted in many cases. Because you will have to change a lot in your Models by adding annotations. Some other solutions will make your application slower, as they suggest to delete the virtual keyword used for lazy loading.
The solution
What I suggest is to just remove the circular references, but how? You just set a single or collection of the entity Book in the entity Author. But you set the single or collection of the entity Author within the Book to Null. Then you will have (A -> B -> Null), so there are no more circular references!
