Hi Jens, and thanks for the response!
Funny, I looked at that and noted pdx-persistent defaults to true in the xml documentation. Though I tried turning it off, I never tried to explicitly turn it on. I tried that, and it fixes the test case. Thanks, I'm marking that as correct.
I'm still a little confused, however. My data is actually targeted for a non-persistent region. Is my interpretation correct on that last statement that in the case of a non-persistent region, the PDXType is created and stored in that same non-persistent region and lost with that region (aka it should never being persisted)?
My confusion lies in that in my situation, with pdx-persistent off, my test case is failing without me ever even attempting to storing anything in a region. Additionally, the persistent region I am defining (both in my test case and those in my project) are not setup to use pdx serialization. They use regular java serialization and work perfectly (start, stop, persistence, crud operations, etc. have all been tested). It isn't until the code tries to use the JSONFormatter during runtime that the error occurs, and though the code never gets there, the resulting PDXInstance/PDXType is intended for a non-persistent region. If it's truly a configuration issue, it seems like it should be caught during bootstrapping, not at runtime when the JSONFormatter is finally used.