Hello. I’ve got a Data Class I’m defining that can...

# getting-started

[Jonathan Hollingsworth]

Hello. I’ve got a Data Class I’m defining that can represent database columns. I’d like one of the properties on the Data Class to be defaultValue, but the type of that value is dependent on dataType property. I was thinking I’d need a union type for defaultValue, but just found out Kotlin doesn’t support that.
I could use Any, but that breaks the kotlinx.serialization @Serialiazable annotation.
Has anyone got any ideas or can point me in the right direction?

[hho]

Generics

DatabaseColumn_kt.kt

[Jonathan Hollingsworth]

Hmm… thanks for that. In this case dataType is going to be a string representing a postgres data type, but I might be able to use that with a mapOf or something to determine the relevant type.

[andylamax]

A bit away from the question, but this is not use case for a data class. You get a lot of overhead with no benefits at all. Just use a plain class instead for this

[Jonathan Hollingsworth]

There are some benefits in the wider usage - which is basically acting as a way of deserializing JSON data from a client app into a known structure.
I totally get the point though; I’m a Kotlin noob and might well be going about this the wrong way.