I apologise in advance for a very long question. Hopefully you'll bear with me.
I'm working with the goweb library, and experimenting with the example web app.
I've been trying to modify the RESTful example code, which defines a Thing
as:
type Thing struct {
Id string
Text string
}
A Thing
is created by sending an HTTP Post
request, with an appropriate JSON
body, to http://localhost:9090/things
. This is handled in the example code in the Create
function, specifically the lines:
dataMap := data.(map[string]interface{})
thing := new(Thing)
thing.Id = dataMap["Id"].(string)
thing.Text = dataMap["Text"].(string)
This is all well and good, and I can run the example server (which listens on http://localhost:9090/
) and the server operates as expected.
For example:
curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"Id":"TestId","Text":"TestText"}' http://localhost:9090/things
returns with no error, and then I GET
that Thing
with
curl http://localhost:9090/things/TestId
and it returns
{"d":{"Id":"TestId","Text":"TestText"},"s":200}
So far, so good.
Now, I would like to modify the Thing
type, and add a custom ThingText
type, like so:
type ThingText struct {
Title string
Body string
}
type Thing struct {
Id string
Text ThingText
}
This in itself isn't an issue, and I can modify the Create
function like so:
thing := new(Thing)
thing.Id = dataMap["Id"].(string)
thing.Text.Title = dataMap["Title"].(string)
thing.Text.Body = dataMap["Body"].(string)
and the run the previous curl
POST
request with the JSON
set to:
{"Id":"TestId","Title":"TestTitle","Title":"TestBody"}
and it returns with no error.
Once again I can GET
the Thing
URL and it returns:
{"d":{"Id":"TestId","Text":{"Title":"TestTitle","Body":"TestBody"}},"s":200}
Again, so far, so good.
Now, my question:
how do I modify the Create
function to allow me to POST
complex JSON
to it?
For example, that last returned JSON
string above includes {"Id":"TestId","Text":{"Title":"TestTitle","Body":"TestBody"}}
. I'd like to be able to POST
that exact JSON
to the endpoint and have the Thing
created.
I've followed the code back, and it seems that the data
variable is of type Context.RequestData()
from https://github.com/stretchr/goweb/context, and the internal Map
seems to be of type Object.Map
from https://github.com/stretchr/stew/, described as "a map[string]interface{} with additional helpful functionality." in particular, I noticed "Supports dot syntax to set deep values."
I can't work out how I can set up the thing.Text.Title = dataMap...
statement so that the correct JSON
field is parsed into it. I can't seem to use anything other than string
types in the dataMap
, and if I try that JSON
it gives an error similar to:
http: panic serving 127.0.0.1:59113: interface conversion: interface is nil, not string
Once again, sorry for the ridiculously long question. I really appreciate you reading, and any help you may have to offer. Thanks!
As the JSON package documentation and JSON and Go introduction describe, JSON data can be parsed either generically through interface{} / string maps or unmarshalling directly to the struct types.
The example code you linked to and you based your changes on seems to use the generic string-map approach, dataMap := data.(map[string]interface{})
.
As your desired JSON data is an object in an object, it’s simply a map within a map.
So you should be able to
dataMap := data.(map[string]interface{})
subthingMap := dataMap["Text"].(map[string]interface{})
thing.Text.Title = subthingMap["Title"].(string)
thing.Text.Body = subthingMap["Body"].(string)
I’m not sure why that code uses casts and generic types over type-safe unmarshalling directly from JSON to struct types (abstraction I guess). Using the json packages unmarshalling to struct types would go something like
type ThingText struct {
Title string
Body string
}
type Thing struct {
Id string
Text ThingText
}
…
decoder := json.NewDecoder(body)
var thingobj Thing
for {
if err := decoder.Decode(&thingobj); err == io.EOF {
break
} else if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println(thingobj)
}
where body
is a io.Reader
- in simple/most cases from http.Response.Body
.