Option for Annotation-based field exclusion (@JsonSchemaIgnore or similar)

[anupsajjan]

❗ Use Case

public class AgentRequest {
    private String message;
    private String sessionId;

    @JsonSchemaIgnore  // Desired: exclude from schema only
    private String internalTraceId;
}

Expected result:

{
  "type": "object",
  "properties": {
    "userMessage": { "type": "string" },
    "sessionId": { "type": "string" }
  },
  "required": ["userMessage"]
}

❌ Current Problem
Spring AI internally uses victools/jsonschema-generator to generate schemas from DTOs. I don’t directly use the generator or control its config.

I want to exclude specific fields from schema, but not from JSON serialization.

Using @JsonIgnore is not viable, as it removes the field from the API response too.

✅ Feature Request
Support an annotation like @JsonSchemaIgnore (or similar) that allows DTOs to declare schema-excluded fields directly.

This would help me exclude fields from schema without needing access to generator config.

🔍 Background
This is particularly useful in AI/LLM applications, where JSON Schema is used to guide model behavior — and leaking internal fields like IDs or metadata can confuse the model.

Would love to hear if this is already possible or if there’s a workaround.
Thanks!

[CarstenWickner]

Hi @anupsajjan,

I didn't know this was being used in spring-ai. That's kind of cool.

According to the current implementation, both the JacksonModule and Swagger2Module are being applied.
The latter respects the @Schema(hidden = true) annotation and would skip the corresponding properties when generating the JSON Schema.
That annotation comes from the io.swagger.core.v3:swagger-annotations dependency, which is included in spring-ai. If you have no concerns about side effects in any OpenAPI definition being generated from the same classes, this might be the easiest way to achieve your described goal without affecting the "normal" serialisation through Jackson.

[anupsajjan]

Hi @CarstenWickner,

Thanks for the response!
Yes Spring-Ai is using jsonschema-generator :)

I was referring to this file spring-ai

I can workaround for now using swagger annotation, but I have few attributes, which need to be shown in swagger as well, and I cant hide them.

It would be really good to have a jsonschema-generator specific annotation, so that it does not interfere with any other behavior.