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Comment by terhechte

1 day ago

Not everybody has this luxury. I once worked on a project where the BE dev had a fundamental issue understanding types (or his PHP code did, who knows), such that, for example, a json array would change its type when empty, e.g.

  // Non-Empty
  {"objects": ["a", "b"]}

  // Empty
  {"objects": {}}

and many other such issues.

4 comments

terhechte

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aeldidi  1 day ago

No kidding. I work with an API at my job that does the following:

1. Instead of omitting optional values or at least setting them to null, optional values are set to an empty string when not present (This is including string fields where an empty string would be valid).

2. Lists are represented in such a way that an empty string means an empty list, a list with one element is simply the element, and only lists with more than one element actually use JSON arrays. For example, to represent a list of points ({ x: number, y: number }):

    // Empty array
    "points": ""
   
    // Single element
    "points": { x: 7, y: 28 }

    // 2 or more elements
    "points": [{ x: 7, y: 28 }, { x: 12, y: 4 }]

3. Everything is stored in a string. The number 5? “5”. A Boolean? “true” or “false”.

What’s funny is I was able to use serde to create wrapper types for each of these so these atrocities were abstracted away. For example, those arrays I described are simply Vec<T> in the actual types with an annotation using #[serde_as(as = “CursedArray<T>”)][0]. Likewise something similar for the string encoded types as well.

[0]: https://docs.rs/serde_with/3.12.0/serde_with/guide/serde_as/...

  • terhechte  18 hours ago

    Man, I feel you. I did the same, the issue is that I had to regularly update my wrapper types as new exceptions occurred

lesuorac  17 hours ago

IIRC, that's because arrays and objects (Associative Arrays) are the same thing in PHP so an empty array can serialized differently than a filled array because it doesn't know if it's associative or not.