I have the following response struct that I want to use as a base wrapper for responding to API calls users send to me.
type Response struct {
Data ??? `json:"data,omitempty"`
Time int64 `json:"time,omitempty"`
Message string `json:"message,omitempty"`
}
The type of the Data field is varying and could be a map[string]*CustomStruct1
map[string*CustomStruct2
or an []CustomStruct3
.
What is the best way to attack this kind of problem?
One option is to simply treat "Data" as the interface{}
(any) type, instead of using your custom structs, and handle the resulting values based on inspection of what actually got unmarshaled. Of course, once you've inspected the data to determine what type it should be you could convert it into the appropriate strong type after the fact.
type Response struct {
Data interface{} `json:"data,omitempty"`
Time int64 `json:"time,omitempty"`
Message string `json:"message,omitempty"`
}
Another option is to embed the "Response" struct into specialized structs that look for your custom types and unmarshal into the appropriate one, assuming you know which one you've got ahead of time:
type BaseResponse struct {
Time int64 `json:"time,omitempty"`
Message string `json:"message,omitempty"`
}
type Response1 struct {
BaseResponse
Data map[string]*CustomStruct1 `json:"data"`
}
type Response2 struct {
BaseResponse
Data map[string]*CustomStruct2 `json:"data"`
}
// etc...
Ultimately, the unmarshaler cannot pick a varying type based on the document that gets unmarshaled, it only deserializes JSON values into structures either defined explicitly by you or into generic ones.
You could try to use reflection, but it wouldn't be very idiomatic.