Handling Dynamic JSON Field Types in Go

When unmarshaling JSON in Go into a struct, one may encounter inconsistencies in the value type of a specific key across API requests. This challenge arises when the server sends different object structures or string references for the same key. This can pose a problem as Go requires a fixed structure for unmarshaling.

To address this issue, a type-dynamic approach using an interface type can be employed. Consider the following JSON data:

{
  "mykey": [
    {obj1}, 
    {obj2}
  ]
}

To capture this dynamic nature, we can define a struct as follows:

type Data struct {
    MyKey []interface{} `json:"mykey"`
}

When JSON with string values is encountered, such as:

{
  "mykey": [
    "/obj1/is/at/this/path", 
    "/obj2/is/at/this/other/path"
  ]
}

The MyKey slice elements will be decoded as strings. For objects, they will be decoded as map[string]interface{} values. This distinction can be made using a type switch:

for i, v := range data.MyKey {
    switch x := v.(type) {
    case string:
        fmt.Println("Got a string: ", x)
    case map[string]interface{}:
        fmt.Printf("Got an object: %#v\n", x)
    }
}

By unmarshaling the JSON into an interface type and using type switches, Go developers can handle dynamic field types and parse the data appropriately, regardless of the structure provided by the server.