Deserializing using JsonCreator that returns null causes NullPointerException

[seppyk]

Using jackson-databind-2.3.3...

Created a Jackson annotated POJO that uses a JsonCreator to deserialize from JSON to the Java object.

private class JsonEntity {
  private final String type;
  private final UUID id;

  private JsonEntity(String type, UUID id) {
    this.type = type;
    this.id = id;
  }

  @JsonCreator
  public static JsonEntity create(@JsonProperty("type") String type, @JsonProperty("id") UUID id) {
    if (StringUtils.isNotBlank(type) && (id != null)) {
      return new JsonEntity(type, id);
    }

    return null;
  }
}

Next, I attempted to deserialize a JSON string using the creator above.

ObjectMapper objectMapper = new ObjectMapper();
String json = "{ \"type\" : \"     \", \"id\" : \"000c0ffb-a0d6-4d2e-a379-4aeaaf283599\" }";
objectMapper.readValue(json, JsonEntity.class);

A NullPointerException occurs because the JsonCreator is returning null. This should be handled more gracefully by throwing a Jackson-specific exception that details the deserialized bean is being returned as null.

java.lang.NullPointerException
  at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.BeanDeserializer._deserializeUsingPropertyBased(BeanDeserializer.java:342)
at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.BeanDeserializerBase.deserializeFromObjectUsingNonDefault(BeanDeserializerBase.java:1071)
at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.BeanDeserializer.deserializeFromObject(BeanDeserializer.java:268)
at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.deser.BeanDeserializer.deserialize(BeanDeserializer.java:124)
at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper._readMapAndClose(ObjectMapper.java:2993)
at com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper.readValue(ObjectMapper.java:2098)
at com.test.JsonTest.testJsonEntityWithBlankType(JsonTest.java:19)

[cowtowncoder]

Sounds reasonable, yes.