Specifying the field path for objects with cyclic dependencies is very unintuitive

[nieldw]

I have a cyclic object graph that looks something like this:

MyObject --> MyGroupingObject --> Set<MyObject>

MyObject has a reference to MyGroupingObject, which has a Set of MyObjects, which each in turn has a MyGroupingObject.

I want to ignore matching the set, and I expect to do it like this:

assertThat(actual, sameBeanAs(expected).ignoring("myGroupingObject.myObjects"));

However, the JSON with cyclic reference pointers looks like this:

{
  "0x1": {
    "myGroupingObject": "0x2"
  },
  "0x2": {
    "myObjects": [
      "0x1",
      "0x3"
    ]
  },
  "0x3": {
    "myGroupingObject": "0x2"
  }
}

In order to ignore "myObjects", I need to do this:

assertThat(actual, sameBeanAs(expected).ignoring("0x2.myObjects").ignoring("0x3"));

This is very unintuitive and requires inspecting the JSON to figure out what the field path is.