Can you deserialize just part of a JSON into an object?

Question

This is more of a concept question than an actual code question but can you deserialize just part of a JSON String into an object or do you have create a class and a sub class for the whole thing. So lets say I have a JSON response like:

{  
    "employee": {  
        "name":       "sonoo",   
        "salary":      56000,   
        "married":    true  
    }  
}

If I wanted to just get data for say just salary could I create a class like this and it still work properly?

    public class Employee {
        public Integer salary;
    }

Answer 1

If you deserialize into an object that is a subset of the fields in the incoming payload, it works just fine.

Employee emp = (Employee) JSON.deserialize(thepayload,Employee.class);

name and married will be ignored.