Session Serializers

Serializers

You can specify a custom serializer with:

application.install(Sessions) {
    cookie<MySession>("SESSION") {
        serializer = MyCustomSerializer()
    }
} 

If you do not specify any serializer, it will use one with an internal optimized format.

SessionSerializerReflection

This is the default serializer, when no serializer is specified:

cookie<MySession>("SESSION") {
    serializer = autoSerializerOf()
}

Custom serializers

The Sessions API provides a SessionSerializer interface, that looks like this:

interface SessionSerializer {
    fun serialize(session: Any): String
    fun deserialize(text: String): Any
}

This interface is for a generic serializer, and you can install it like this:

cookie<MySession>("NAME") {
    serializer = MyCustomSerializer()
}

So for example you can create a JSON session serializer using Gson:

class GsonSessionSerializer(
    val type: java.lang.reflect.Type, val gson: Gson = Gson(), configure: Gson.() -> Unit = {}
) : SessionSerializer {
    init {
        configure(gson)
    }
    override fun serialize(session: Any): String = gson.toJson(session)
    override fun deserialize(text: String): Any = gson.fromJson(text, type)
}

And configuring it:

cookie<MySession>("NAME") {
    serializer = GsonSessionSerializer(MySession::class.java)
}