Hey friends! Looking for some help on keeping a su...

# serialization

[ankushg]

Hey friends! Looking for some help on keeping a subset of JSON in string-form

I have JSON like

{
  "id": "file",
  "value": "File",
  "popup": {
    "menuitem": [
      {
        "value": "New",
        "onclick": "CreateDoc()"
      },
      {
        "value": "Open",
        "onclick": "OpenDoc()"
      },
      {
        "value": "Save",
        "onclick": "SaveDoc()"
      }
    ]
  }
}

I'd like to represent it with a data class Menu(val id: String, val value: String, val popup: String) where the popup subtree is stored as a String of valid JSON, instead of having to deserialize the whole nested popup structure.

Happy to write a custom serializer for this because it doesn't happen too frequently in our codebase.

[ephemient]

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization/issues/1058

[ankushg]

Ahh super unfortunate.

Looks like a big issue for the original author of the issue was that they couldn't handle the memory pressure of JsonElement .

I'm OK with using JsonElement behind the scenes, but still need the public API to be using String.

Is this something a custom serializer could handle?

[ephemient]

if you're okay with that, serializing through a surrogate JsonElement should work

[ephemient]

quick hack

Untitled.kt

[ankushg]

Nice I also threw something like that together myself!

I'm assuming that typealiases are invisible to Serialization right?

In other words, I can't just define a “typealias RawJson = String” and globally give it the surrogate serializer because it'll mess with regular Strings?

[ephemient]

correct, typealias is not a type
you could define a value class though

[ankushg]

Yeah that's the plan once I've migrated to JS IR 😄