java.lang.ClassCastException: java.util.LinkedHashMap cannot be cast to com.testing.models.Account

The issue's coming from Jackson. When it doesn't have enough information on what class to deserialize to, it uses LinkedHashMap.

Since you're not informing Jackson of the element type of your ArrayList, it doesn't know that you want to deserialize into an ArrayList of Accounts. So it falls back to the default.

Instead, you could probably use as(JsonNode.class), and then deal with the ObjectMapper in a richer manner than rest-assured allows. Something like this:

ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();

JsonNode accounts = given().when().expect().statusCode(expectedResponseCode)
    .get("accounts/" + newClub.getOwner().getCustId() + "/clubs")
    .as(JsonNode.class);


//Jackson's use of generics here are completely unsafe, but that's another issue
List<Account> accountList = mapper.convertValue(
    accounts, 
    new TypeReference<List<Account>>(){}
);

assertThat(accountList.get(0).getId()).isEqualTo(expectedId);

Try the following:

POJO pojo = mapper.convertValue(singleObject, POJO.class);

or:

List<POJO> pojos = mapper.convertValue(
    listOfObjects,
    new TypeReference<List<POJO>>() { });

See conversion of LinkedHashMap for more information.

The way I could mitigate the JSON Array to collection of LinkedHashMap objects problem was by using CollectionType rather than a TypeReference . This is what I did and worked:

public <T> List<T> jsonArrayToObjectList(String json, Class<T> tClass) throws IOException {
    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    CollectionType listType = mapper.getTypeFactory().constructCollectionType(ArrayList.class, tClass);
    List<T> ts = mapper.readValue(json, listType);
    LOGGER.debug("class name: {}", ts.get(0).getClass().getName());
    return ts;
}

---

Using the TypeReference, I was still getting an ArrayList of LinkedHashMaps, i.e. does not work:

public <T> List<T> jsonArrayToObjectList(String json, Class<T> tClass) throws IOException {
    ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
    List<T> ts = mapper.readValue(json, new TypeReference<List<T>>(){});
    LOGGER.debug("class name: {}", ts.get(0).getClass().getName());
    return ts;
}