How to tell Jackson to ignore a field during serialization if its value is null?

To suppress serializing properties with null values using Jackson >2.0, you can configure the ObjectMapper directly, or make use of the @JsonInclude annotation:

mapper.setSerializationInclusion(Include.NON_NULL);

or:

@JsonInclude(Include.NON_NULL)
class Foo
{
  String bar;
}

Alternatively, you could use @JsonInclude in a getter so that the attribute would be shown if the value is not null.

A more complete example is available in my answer to How to prevent null values inside a Map and null fields inside a bean from getting serialized through Jackson.