Hello hello! I was wondering, I have an app that h...

# ktor

[Joost Klitsie]

Hello hello! I was wondering, I have an app that has a KTOR client. There are many CRUD operations in the app and not really the ability to abstract it all away nicely, due to reified function calls within ktor library. I have for example an abstract base class which I want to have set/get/delete/update operations with the generic types I need. But within this base class, I cannot do:

abstract class ApiDataSource<T>(private val httpClient: HttpClient) {

    fun update(value: T) {
        httpClient.put {
            setBody(value) // <-- T needs to be reified
        }
    }
}

As of course setBody needs to have a reified type. I was looking through the functions, and nowhere can I pass a type or kclass. Am I missing something?

Also, a workaround would be to serialize the body myself (by passing the KSerializer in the constructor and Json and setBody with the serialized text), but would this be preferable? I rather serialize through using the ContentNegotiation plugin

[Rustam Siniukov]

Hm, we may need to provide fun setBody(body: Any, type: TypeInfo) . So far you can set request.body and request.bodyType manually, but you will need to opt-in to usage of properties marked with @InternalAPI

[Joost Klitsie]

thanks for the answer! At least I am not missing anything then 🙂

[Joost Klitsie]

my current "workaround" is to provide inline functions from the base class (instead of get ->`doGet` and update -> doUpdate so I map the implementation's method to this inline function in the base class: override fun update(value: SomeDataClass) = doUpdate(value) But then for every class I need to provide these overrides so that is extra effort, especially if I change the interface.