Is there a way to format this json in golang? - json

Question

I'm just starting to learn GoLang today, I'm trying to build a simple Rest API Web server.
Here's the response Struct I want to send for each request to the web server :
package main
type HttpResp struct{
Status int `json:"status"`
Description string `json:"description"`
Body string `json:"body"`
}
And here's my articles.go file who have the function who gets all the articles in the database :
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"net/http"
"log"
)
type Article struct{
Id string `json:"id"`
Title string `json:"title"`
Body string `json:"body"`
Description string `json:"description"`
}
func AllArticles(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request){
log.Print("/articles - GET")
db := connect()
defer db.Close()
var articles []Article
results, err := db.Query("SELECT * FROM Articles")
if err != nil{
log.Print(err)
return
}
for results.Next(){
var article Article
err = results.Scan(&article.Title, &article.Description, &article.Body, &article.Id)
if err != nil{
serr, _ := json.Marshal(err)
json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(HttpResp{Status: 500, Description: "Failed to retrieve all articles", Body: string(serr)})
}
articles = append(articles, article)
}
sarr, _ := json.Marshal(articles)
w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(HttpResp{Status: 200, Body: string(sarr)})
}
The issue I'm facing here is that the response is like this :
{"status":200,"description":"","body":"[{\"id\":\"1\",\"title\":\"First\",\"body\":\"This
is a test body\",\"description\":\"This is a test\"}]"}
I'd like the body to be just JSON and not a string. How can I acheive that ?

Answer 1

No point in marshalling the body separately from the HttpResp. Instead change the Body field's type to interface{} and then set the field to any value of a concrete type as opposed to a json string, e.g. []Article and then marshal the resp once.
type HttpResp struct{
Status int `json:"status"`
Description string `json:"description"`
Body interface{} `json:"body"`
}
And the rest...
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"net/http"
"log"
)
type Article struct{
Id string `json:"id"`
Title string `json:"title"`
Body string `json:"body"`
Description string `json:"description"`
}
func AllArticles(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request){
log.Print("/articles - GET")
db := connect()
defer db.Close()
var articles []Article
results, err := db.Query("SELECT * FROM Articles")
if err != nil{
log.Print(err)
return
}
for results.Next(){
var article Article
err = results.Scan(&article.Title, &article.Description, &article.Body, &article.Id)
if err != nil{
serr, _ := json.Marshal(err)
json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(HttpResp{Status: 500, Description: "Failed to retrieve all articles", Body: string(serr)})
}
articles = append(articles, article)
}
w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(HttpResp{Status: 200, Body: articles})
}