title: How can you register a converter to convert between a String and a List of specific types in Spring Web MVC?
body: <p>Our app accepts a JSON-based string in a controller method that we'd like to convert using Spring's Converter interface into a List of our specific classes.  </p>
  
  <p>The string is a part of a larger form submission containing additional parameters that are sent at various times.</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately it looks like Spring is picking up this converter (declared as <code>&lt;String, List&lt;Proprietary&gt;&gt;</code>) and using it to convert all Strings into Lists, which is not what is desired.  </p>
  
  <p>Is there any way around this using the conversion service provided by Spring MVC?  We've worked around this by just accepting the string in the controller method and performing the conversion directly, but that's not as clean.</p>