I needed to marshal http.Request to json, but this struct contains few fields which are not serialise-able. Here is some sample code:
// imports and error handling is omitted for brevity
func main() {
req, _ := http.NewRequest("GET", "http://example.com", nil)
_, err := json.Marshal(req)
fmt.Println(err)
}
When you run the above code, we get an error:
json: unsupported type: func() (io.ReadCloser, error)
So I inspected the struct, found out that it has two fields which json doesn’t know how to serialize:
// in net/http
type Request struct {
// snipped
GetBody func() (io.ReadCloser, error)
Cancel <-chan struct{}
}
I wrote a wrapper struct in which I embedded the http.Request object, redefined these fields. Do note that the json struct tags need to match with the corresponding fields from http.Request:
type RequestWrapper struct {
// the types of variables `GetBody` and `Cancel` do not
// really matter since I don't want them in my final json output
GetBody string `json:"GetBody,omitempty"`
Cancel string `json:"Cancel,omitempty"`
*http.Request
}
func main() {
req, _ := http.NewRequest("GET", "http://example.com", nil)
reqWrapper := &RequestWrapper{req}
out, _ := json.Marshal(reqWrapper)
fmt.Println(string(out))
}
This works nicely! Since we don’t care about GetBody, Cancel fields, you might be tempted to use - struct tag instead of explicit mention of omitempty:
type RequestWrapper struct {
GetBody string `json:"-"`
Cancel string `json:"-"`
*http.Request
}
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work and we ran into the same error which we had encountered earlier. That is because, the wrapper struct fields gets ignored for json marshaling, but embedded struct’s fields get considered.
Now, lets test our code with an HTTP request containing body:
func main() {
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "http://example.com", strings.NewReader("Hello, World!"))
reqWrapper := &RequestWrapper{Request: req}
out, _ := json.Marshal(reqWrapper)
fmt.Println(string(out))
}
Uh oh! we see that request body isn’t marshaled correctly:
{
"Body": {"Reader": {}},
// snipped
}
Body field is of type io.ReadCloser. While serialising JSON doesn’t throw any error, but it doesn’t know how to serialise it either. So, we will slightly modify our struct:
type RequestWrapper struct {
// this assumes Body is always a string
Body string `json:"Body,omitempty"`
// the types of variables `GetBody` and `Cancel` do not
// really matter since I don't want them in my final json output
GetBody string `json:"GetBody,omitempty"`
Cancel string `json:"Cancel,omitempty"`
*http.Request
}
Then we read the body, assign it to this newly added field:
func main() {
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "http://example.com", strings.NewReader("Hello, World!"))
body, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(req.Body)
reqWrapper := &RequestWrapper{Request: req, Body: string(body)}
out, _ := json.Marshal(reqWrapper)
fmt.Println(string(out))
}
This works perfectly!
Bonus
The same can be achieved by implementing MarshalJSON() on the RequestWrapper, which I find it to be cleaner:
package main
import (
"encoding/json"
"fmt"
"io/ioutil"
"net/http"
"strings"
)
type RequestWrapper struct {
*http.Request
}
func (r *RequestWrapper) MarshalJSON() ([]byte, error) {
body, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(r.Request.Body)
return json.Marshal(&struct {
Body string `json:"Body,omitempty"`
GetBody string `json:"GetBody,omitempty"`
Cancel string `json:"Cancel,omitempty"`
*http.Request
}{
Body: string(body),
Request: r.Request,
})
}
func main() {
req, _ := http.NewRequest("POST", "http://example.com", strings.NewReader("Hello, World!"))
reqWrapper := &RequestWrapper{Request: req}
out, _ := json.Marshal(reqWrapper)
fmt.Println(string(out))
}
Note
If you are passing around this request object, then the next method won’t be able to read the body. In that case, buffer needs to be refilled:
body, _ := ioutil.ReadAll(req.Body)
// then assign an `io.ReadCloser` back to it
req.Body = ioutil.NopCloser(bytes.NewBuffer(body))