JSON decode unknown object - json

I'm trying to decode a json response with a struct type. An instance of the object i'm trying to decode looks as follows:
{
"title": "Some Title",
"views": 344,
"profiles": {
"customField": "somevalue",
"customField2:" :somevalue"
}
}
The golang struct is the following:
type Topic struct {
Title string `json:"title"`
Views string `json:"views"`
Profiles string `json:"profiles"`
}
As you can see, the "Profiles" attribute is a string, since the profiles object is unknown, as the fields inside it can be dinamically defined.
I'm trying to decode this with:
json.NewDecoder(response.Body).Decode(result)
Where result is of type Topic, but isn't working. What type should the "Profiles" attribute be in order to correctly decoding the answer?
Thanks!

Reading the comment it's clear that profiles value could be of any type, for this reason I suggest you to declare the Profiles type as a map[string]interface{}.
Topic becomes:
type Topic struct {
Title string `json:"title"`
Views int32 `json:"views"`
Profiles map[string]interface{} `json:"profiles"`
}

Check out https://github.com/mitchellh/mapstructure
The readme has an answer you probably look for.
problem is if you have configuration or an encoding that changes slightly depending on specific fields.
Perhaps we can't populate a specific structure without first reading the "type" field from the JSON. We could always do two passes over the decoding of the JSON (reading the "type" first, and the rest later). However, it is much simpler to just decode this into a map[string]interface{} structure, read the "type" key, then use something like this library to decode it into the proper structure.

If profiles can vary you should take json.RawMessage here. Internally it is a []byte which late can be unmarshalled into other types, e.g. depending on values of the outer document.
See https://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/#RawMessage and the examples.

The Profiles should be a struct and initiated along with the container, in this case I assume it's a Status, such as FB status or Tweet, I've made an example here https://play.golang.org/p/tG90idakLP
Remember to instantiate the new profiles inside a newly created status, before you start unmarshalling.

Related

Convert struct to map annotated with `firestore:"field_name"`

I have a struct -
type User struct {
Uid string `firestore:"uid"`
FcmToken string `firestore:"fcmtoken"
}
How do I convert It to map using json.Marshal(user) ,
I know it can be done when struct fields are annotated with json:"fieldname" but I don't know how to do the same when it is annotated with firestore, or is it even possible?
I have used the word annotation, which may not be what it is called, please correct me!
A field tag can contain multiple key/value pairs. See the struct tag documentation for more details.
Edit the field tags to include whatever JSON configuration you want:
type User struct {
Uid string `firestore:"uid" json:"uid"`
FcmToken string `firestore:"fcmtoken" json:"tid"`
}
It is not possible to make the JSON package use the firestore tags or vice versa.

Handling two forms of JSON?

I'm writing an application in Go that will recieve two forms of JSON:
Example 1:
{"book_data":{"title":"book-title","page_number":457}}
Example 2:
{"book_data":{"collection":214},"books":{"data":[{"title":"book-title","page_number":457},{"title":"book-title","page_number":354}]}}
I thought that I could create a struct like the following and unmarshal JSON into it:
type Book struct {
Title string `json:"title"`
PageNumber int `json:"page_number"`
}
but that only works for the first example.
How can I handle JSON from both examples?
You can first unmarshal partly in json.RawMessage to next decide depending of unmarshalled payload. And you also can just unmarshal in more generic structure. Something like
type Book struct {
Title string `json:"title"`
PageNumber int `json:"page_number"`
}
type BookShelf struct {
BookData struct {
Book
Collection int `json:"collection"`
} `json:"book_data"`
Books struct {
Data []Book `json:"data"`
} `json:"books"`
}
which for me looks readable, meaningful and handy enough for further processing.
Why not unmarshal to a map[string]interface{} and then use the result to see which form you need to handle? You can then deserialize with a specific struct type for each form.
Another way would be to use the following package to check for differing attributes, so you can decide which struct to use for the real unmarshaling.
https://github.com/go-xmlpath/xmlpath/tree/v2
You can unmarshal to map because your key is string and value may be anything like - map[string]interface{}. If you are not sure any data type or value then use interface{} beacause it can store any value. Then use result to see which form it is, And deserialize to specific struct type.
Another way to convert JSON to go struct is use this tool.
https://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/

Unmarshal inconsistent JSON

I have JSON (that I cannot control) like this:
{
"foo1":{
"a":{
"up":10,
"down":5
}
},
"foo2":{
"a":{
"up":1,
"down":1
}
},
"bar":{
"up":11,
"down":6
}
}
"foo1" and "foo2" are dynamic.
How can I properly unmarshal this structure in go?
It would be okay if I could just tell go to not try to deserialize "bar" (the inconsistent property).
Go will by default ignore fields unspecified in the struct you unmarshal into.
In this case, your structure would be set up like this:
type NestedProp2 struct {
Up int
Down int
}
type NestedProp struct {
A NestedProp2
}
type Prop struct {
Foo1 NestedProp
Foo2 NestedProp
}
When you call the the json.Unmarshal function, the extra property will not be deserialized:
var prop Prop
err := json.Unmarshal(jsonBlob, &prop)
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("error:", err)
}
fmt.Printf("%+v", prop)
So you get the following output:
{Foo1:{A:{Up:10 Down:5}} Foo2:{A:{Up:1 Down:1}}}
You can see it in action here.
You said:
I have JSON (that I cannot control)
So to what extent you could control? Here I could provide you with some scenario, and hope some of them match your purpose :)
Remember the general rule first:
In Golang, if a JSON key failed to find a matched field in struct, it will not be unmarshalled.
This means, for a key name in a JSON struct, when unmarshalling, it will look for a field in a golang struct at the same level with the same name case-insensitively. If this search failed, this key won't be unmarshalled.
For example, a key named foo1 will look for a field name foo1 in a golang struct at the same indent level. However it also matches with Foo1 or FoO1, since this matching is case-insensitive.
Remember, you could use field tag to specify the field name as well. Please take a look at the official page.
The value of some of the JSON fields are not consistent, and they could be ignored.
This is the case #gnalck solved in his answer. According to the general rule, if those inconsistent field failed to find a match, they will not be unmarshalled. Therefore, just don't put those inconsistent fields in the struct and you will be fine.
The value of some of the JSON fields are not consistent, but they could not be ignored.
In this case, #gnalck failed since those fields could not be ignored. Now a better way is to unmarshal bar into a json.RawMessage, so that you could unmarshal later.
The keys of the JSON object is undetermined, and their value is undetermined as well.
In this case, we could unmarshal the whole JSON object into a map[string]json.RawMessage, and unmarshal each fields later. When unmarshalling to a map, you could iterate through the map to get all the fields, and unmarshal them into a proper struct later.

json.Unmarshal doesn't seem to pay attention to struct tags

I have a JSON object that looks like this:
{"API version":"1.2.3"}
And I want to convert it to an object it using the json.Unmarshal() function in go. According to this blog post:
How does Unmarshal identify the fields in which to store the decoded data? For a given JSON key "Foo", Unmarshal will look through the destination struct's fields to find (in order of preference):
An exported field with a tag of "Foo" (see the Go spec for more on struct tags),
An exported field named "Foo", or
An exported field named "FOO" or "FoO" or some other case-insensitive match of "Foo".
This is confirmed by the unmarshal documentation.
Since "API version" has a space in it, which is not a valid go identifier, I used a tag on the field:
type ApiVersion struct {
Api_version string "API version"
}
And I try to unmarshal it like so:
func GetVersion() (ver ApiVersion, err error) {
// Snip code that gets the JSON
log.Println("Json:",string(data))
err = json.Unmarshal(data,&ver)
log.Println("Unmarshalled:",ver);
}
The output is:
2014/01/06 16:47:38 Json: {"API version":"1.2.3"}
2014/01/06 16:47:38 Unmarshalled: {}
As you can see, the JSON isn't being marshalled into ver. What am I missing?
The encoding/json module requires that the struct tags be namespaced. So you instead want something like:
type ApiVersion struct {
Api_version string `json:"API version"`
}
This is done so that the json struct tags can co-exist with tags from other libraries (such as the XML encoder).

Golang, Decoding json into custom structure

I'm trying to pull reddit content from the json API into a custom structure for the client. the structure i've come up with in go for this is
type Subreddit struct {
offset int
num_of_posts int
subscribers: int
thumbnail string
children []post
}
type post struct {
type string
url string
thumbnail string
submitted_by string
upvotes int
downvotes int
}
unfortunately the reddit json isn't formatted even close to this and in addition i'll want to filter out url's i can't support etc.
The only way i know to do it this is to create an interface for each of the "children" in the source data, and iterate through each child manually, creating an individual "post" for each interface. and pushing them into the subreddit object's post array.
For reference the data is formatted like http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/.json
Is this the right way to do this? Or is there a faster way. It seems like a lot of overhead for such a small task, but i'm a PHP Javascript dev, so It's just unusual for me I suppose.
Before I even start to answer the question:
Remember that your struct fields must be exported in order to be used with the encoding/json package.
Secondly I must admit I am not entirely sure what you meant with the entire create an interface for each of the "children" part. But it sounded complicated ;)
Anyway, to your answer:
If you wish to use the standard encoding/json package to unmarshal the json, you must use an intermediate structure unless you will use a similar structure as the one used by Reddit.
Below you can find an example of how parts of the Reddit structure might be mapped to Go structs. By Unmarshalling the json into an instance of RedditRoot, you can then easily iterate over the Children , remove any unwanted child, and populate your Subreddit struct:
type RedditRoot struct {
Kind string `json:"kind"`
Data RedditData `json:"data"`
}
type RedditData struct {
Children []RedditDataChild `json:"children"`
}
type RedditDataChild struct {
Kind string `json:"kind"`
Data *Post `json:"data"`
}
type Post struct {
Type string `json:"-"` // Is this equal to data.children[].data.kind?
Url string `json:"url"`
Thumbnail string `json:"thumbnail"`
Submitted_by string `json:"author"`
Upvotes int `json:"ups"`
Downvotes int `json:"downs"`
}