A generic json handler in Go

Graham Hay

One of the things I really like about Go is the way it encourages you to build up behaviour using composition. For example, I was writing handlers that return a response object as json; it’s very simple to extract the duplicated code into a generic handler:

package main

import (
	"encoding/json"
	"log"
	"net/http"
)

type ResponseGenerator interface {
	GetResponse(r *http.Request) (interface{}, error)
}

type JsonHandler struct {
	log *log.Logger
	rg  ResponseGenerator
}

func (h *JsonHandler) ServeHTTP(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	response, err := h.rg.GetResponse(r)
	if err != nil {
		h.log.Printf("ERROR: %v\n", err)
		http.Error(w, err.Error(), http.StatusBadRequest)
		return
	}

	b, err := json.Marshal(response)
	if err != nil {
		h.log.Printf("ERROR: %v\n", err)
		http.Error(w, "Unexpected error", http.StatusInternalServerError)
		return
	}

	w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "application/json")
	w.Write(b)
}

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