Question

Consider that you get this JSON object:

{ id: 3, name: 'C' }

How can you tell if it’s a Vitamin object or a Programming language object. Am I clear?

In typed languages, we simply understand the nature of the object (the Type of the object) from its very name. Each object has a name. How we might achieve something similar with JSON? How can we give names to JSON objects? Any established pattern?

Answer 1

If you have this problem it means that your serialization format is not properly defined. You should always be able to deserialize from a JSON object without any trouble.

There are two options:

Add a type field: You can’t create the typed object because there are multiple types with the same set of field names. By adding a type field, there is no question about the underlying type of the object. With this option, you will have to go through the process of handling the type field when creating the real object.

Use context to decide what type the object is: If the query you submitted implies that only one type of object should be returned, then there is no problem. Alternately, if multiple types can be returned, the response format should group the objects by type.

{
  "states": [ { id: 3, name: 'New York' } ],
  "cities": [ { id: 4, name: 'New York' } ]
}