since few days I was struggling on how to proceed with PATCH request in Go REST API until I have found an article about using pointers and omitempty tag which I have populated and is working fine. Fine until I have realized I still have to build an UPDATE SQL query.
My struct looks like this:
type Resource struct {
Name *string `json:"name,omitempty" sql:"resource_id"`
Description *string `json:"description,omitempty" sql:"description"`
}
I am expecting a PATCH /resources/{resource-id} request containing such a request body:
{"description":"Some new description"}
In my handler I will build the Resource object this way (ignoring imports, ignoring error handling):
var resource Resource
resourceID, _ := mux.Vars(r)["resource-id"]
d := json.NewDecoder(r.Body)
d.Decode(&resource)
// at this point our resource object should only contain
// the Description field with the value from JSON in request body
Now, for normal UPDATE (PUT request) I would do this (simplified):
stmt, _ := db.Prepare(`UPDATE resources SET description = ?, name = ? WHERE resource_id = ?`)
res, _ := stmt.Exec(resource.Description, resource.Name, resourceID)
The problem with PATCH and omitempty tag is that the object might be missing multiple properties, thus I cannot just prepare a statement with hardcoded fields and placeholders... I will have to build it dynamically.
And here comes my question: how can I build such UPDATE query dynamically? In the best case I'd need some solution with identifying the set properties, getting their SQL field names (probably from the tags) and then I should be able to build the UPDATE query. I know I can use reflection to get the object properties but have no idea hot to get their sql tag name and of course I'd like to avoid using reflection here if possible... Or I could simply check for each property it is not nil, but in real life the structs are much bigger than provided example here...
Can somebody help me with this one? Did somebody already have to solve the same/similar situation?
SOLUTION:
Based on the answers here I was able to come up with this abstract solution. The SQLPatches method builds the SQLPatch struct from the given struct (so no concrete struct specific):
import (
"fmt"
"encoding/json"
"reflect"
"strings"
)
const tagname = "sql"
type SQLPatch struct {
Fields []string
Args []interface{}
}
func SQLPatches(resource interface{}) SQLPatch {
var sqlPatch SQLPatch
rType := reflect.TypeOf(resource)
rVal := reflect.ValueOf(resource)
n := rType.NumField()
sqlPatch.Fields = make([]string, 0, n)
sqlPatch.Args = make([]interface{}, 0, n)
for i := 0; i < n; i++ {
fType := rType.Field(i)
fVal := rVal.Field(i)
tag := fType.Tag.Get(tagname)
// skip nil properties (not going to be patched), skip unexported fields, skip fields to be skipped for SQL
if fVal.IsNil() || fType.PkgPath != "" || tag == "-" {
continue
}
// if no tag is set, use the field name
if tag == "" {
tag = fType.Name
}
// and make the tag lowercase in the end
tag = strings.ToLower(tag)
sqlPatch.Fields = append(sqlPatch.Fields, tag+" = ?")
var val reflect.Value
if fVal.Kind() == reflect.Ptr {
val = fVal.Elem()
} else {
val = fVal
}
switch val.Kind() {
case reflect.Int, reflect.Int8, reflect.Int16, reflect.Int32, reflect.Int64:
sqlPatch.Args = append(sqlPatch.Args, val.Int())
case reflect.String:
sqlPatch.Args = append(sqlPatch.Args, val.String())
case reflect.Bool:
if val.Bool() {
sqlPatch.Args = append(sqlPatch.Args, 1)
} else {
sqlPatch.Args = append(sqlPatch.Args, 0)
}
}
}
return sqlPatch
}
Then I can simply call it like this:
type Resource struct {
Description *string `json:"description,omitempty"`
Name *string `json:"name,omitempty"`
}
func main() {
var r Resource
json.Unmarshal([]byte(`{"description": "new description"}`), &r)
sqlPatch := SQLPatches(r)
data, _ := json.Marshal(sqlPatch)
fmt.Printf("%s\n", data)
}
You can check it at Go Playground. The only problem here I see is that I allocate both the slices with the amount of fields in the passed struct, which may be 10, even though I might only want to patch one property in the end resulting in allocating more memory than needed... Any idea how to avoid this?
