jsontime

Solve your time marshalling problems with this barebones time package wrapper.

Usage

This package provides two aliases for the basic time objects,

• type Time time.Time
• type Duration time.Duration

These aliases can be marshalled to and from any json and yaml document. Just use these types in your fields that you intend to marshal/unmarshal a time object.

import "github.com/anz-bank/sysl-go/jsontime"

type Response struct {
    ExpiryTime    jsontime.Time     `json:"expiry"`
    RefreshPeriod jsontime.Duration `json:"refresh"`
    // Other fields, make sure they are exported!
}

You can the set the response with a single line, instead of stringifying first

var resp := &Response{
    // Set expiry time to now + 5 mins
    ExpiryTime: jsontime.Time(time.Now().Add(5 * time.Minute))

    // Set refresh period to 1 minute
    RefreshPeriod: jsontime.Duration(time.Minute)
}

Now you can marshal the response body

// Marshal response body
body, _ := json.Marshal(resp)

Or read a response body

// Read response body
var r Response
_ := json.Unmarshal(body, &r)

// Get the underlying types
exp := r.ExpiryTime.Time()
refresh := r.RefreshPeriod.Duration()

This nice thing about this last one is that validation of the time and duration strings are done in the unmarshal function, and the returned type is already in time types.

Recommendations

Go duration strings are not standard format for REST APIs, so avoid using them for Request/Response types. There is no real difference if you use this packages time, or time.Time.

Use both freely in config (especially when reading yaml). Chances are you will use Duration much more than Time in config though.