Hello I'm using Ktor Client and I faced an issue t...

# ktor

[robercoding]

Hello I'm using Ktor Client and I faced an issue that I don't know how to solve although I think I have some ideas on how to solve it
Disclaimer: I don't know if I should post it here or #serialization 😅

There's an API that for the same parameter can return a String or a List<String>, if I get the response and use response.body<MyClass>()
For instance this is MyClass

@Serializable
data class MyClass(
    val parameter: String // Could also be List<String>
)

Of course this fails to serialize because there's an illegal input, expect a specific type not both.
This crashes when finds that there's some parameter in the json that is a List<String>

I was thinking of ways to solve it, and the first thought was setting Any but, of course, breaks the serialisation laws.
Then I thought that maybe I can do some custom deserialization but I don't wanna spend too much time shooting my shot in the dark.

Do you know if that's the way or is there any other better approach?

[Aleksei Tirman [JB]]

I would receive the body as a String or ByteArray and try to convert it twice by catching the serialization exception.

[Aleksei Tirman [JB]]

Or you can convert the body to JsonElement and check the type manually.

[robercoding]

Beautiful, JsonElement removes any headache!! Thank you 😉

and try to convert it twice by catching the serialization exception.

Just curious, is there any example for this? I wonder how much effort would involve in doing this

[Aleksei Tirman [JB]]

Never mind. I though that you need to convert to List<MyClass> or MyClass .

[Aleksei Tirman [JB]]

A custom converter would solve that problem.