Removing fields from struct or hiding them in JSON Response

Question

I\'ve created an API in Go that, upon being called, performs a query, creates an instance of a struct, and then encodes that struct as JSON before sending back to the caller

Answer 1

You can use the reflect package to select the fields that you want by reflecting on the field tags and selecting the json tag values. Define a method on your SearchResults type that selects the fields you want and returns them as a map[string]interface{}, and then marshal that instead of the SearchResults struct itself. Here's an example of how you might define that method:

func fieldSet(fields ...string) map[string]bool {
    set := make(map[string]bool, len(fields))
    for _, s := range fields {
        set[s] = true
    }
    return set
}

func (s *SearchResult) SelectFields(fields ...string) map[string]interface{} {
    fs := fieldSet(fields...)
    rt, rv := reflect.TypeOf(*s), reflect.ValueOf(*s)
    out := make(map[string]interface{}, rt.NumField())
    for i := 0; i < rt.NumField(); i++ {
        field := rt.Field(i)
        jsonKey := field.Tag.Get("json")
        if fs[jsonKey] {
            out[jsonKey] = rv.Field(i).Interface()
        }
    }
    return out
}

and here's a runnable solution that shows how you would call this method and marshal your selection: http://play.golang.org/p/1K9xjQRnO8