I'm using GSON to deserialise some JSON. The JSON is:

{
    "employee_id": 297,
    "surname": "Maynard",
    "givenname": "Ron",
    "lastlogin": "",

...

The Employee Object has a Date field lastlogin:

public class Employee {
private Integer employee_id;

private String surname;

private String givenname;

private Date lastlogin;

The problem I have is that when the lastlogin value isn't populated, it's an empty String in the JSON, so the GSON parser throws:

java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: ""
at java.text.DateFormat.parse(DateFormat.java:337)
at com.google.gson.internal.bind.DateTypeAdapter.deserializeToDate(DateTypeAdapter.java:79)
at com.google.gson.internal.bind.DateTypeAdapter.read(DateTypeAdapter.java:66)

What's the usual way around this?

java json gson
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