Cardano.Api.Serialise.Json

A type that can be converted from JSON, with the possibility of failure.

In many cases, you can get the compiler to generate parsing code for you (see below). To begin, let's cover writing an instance by hand.

There are various reasons a conversion could fail. For example, an Object could be missing a required key, an Array could be of the wrong size, or a value could be of an incompatible type.

The basic ways to signal a failed conversion are as follows:

• fail yields a custom error message: it is the recommended way of reporting a failure;

• empty (or mzero) is uninformative: use it when the error is meant to be caught by some (<|>);

• typeMismatch can be used to report a failure when the encountered value is not of the expected JSON type; unexpected is an appropriate alternative when more than one type may be expected, or to keep the expected type implicit.

prependFailure (or modifyFailure) add more information to a parser's error messages.

An example type and instance using typeMismatch and prependFailure:

-- Allow ourselves to write Text literals.
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

data Coord = Coord { x :: Double, y :: Double }

instance FromJSON Coord where
    parseJSON (Object v) = Coord
        <$> v .: "x"
        <*> v .: "y"

    -- We do not expect a non-Object value here.
    -- We could use empty to fail, but typeMismatch
    -- gives a much more informative error message.
    parseJSON invalid    =
        prependFailure "parsing Coord failed, "
            (typeMismatch "Object" invalid)

For this common case of only being concerned with a single type of JSON value, the functions withObject, withScientific, etc. are provided. Their use is to be preferred when possible, since they are more terse. Using withObject, we can rewrite the above instance (assuming the same language extension and data type) as:

instance FromJSON Coord where
    parseJSON = withObject "Coord" $ \v -> Coord
        <$> v .: "x"
        <*> v .: "y"

Instead of manually writing your FromJSON instance, there are two options to do it automatically:

• Data.Aeson.TH provides Template Haskell functions which will derive an instance at compile time. The generated instance is optimized for your type so it will probably be more efficient than the following option.

• The compiler can provide a default generic implementation for parseJSON.

To use the second, simply add a deriving Generic clause to your datatype and declare a FromJSON instance for your datatype without giving a definition for parseJSON.

For example, the previous example can be simplified to just:

{-# LANGUAGE DeriveGeneric #-}

import GHC.Generics

data Coord = Coord { x :: Double, y :: Double } deriving Generic

instance FromJSON Coord

or using the DerivingVia extension

deriving via Generically Coord instance FromJSON Coord

The default implementation will be equivalent to parseJSON = genericParseJSON defaultOptions; if you need different options, you can customize the generic decoding by defining:

customOptions = defaultOptions
                { fieldLabelModifier = map toUpper
                }

instance FromJSON Coord where
    parseJSON = genericParseJSON customOptions

Read the docs for ToJSONKey first. This class is a conversion in the opposite direction. If you have a newtype wrapper around Text, the recommended way to define instances is with generalized newtype deriving:

newtype SomeId = SomeId { getSomeId :: Text }
  deriving (Eq,Ord,Hashable,FromJSONKey)

If you have a sum of nullary constructors, you may use the generic implementation:

data Color = Red | Green | Blue
  deriving Generic

instance FromJSONKey Color where
  fromJSONKey = genericFromJSONKey defaultJSONKeyOptions

A type that can be converted to JSON.

Instances in general must specify toJSON and should (but don't need to) specify toEncoding.

An example type and instance:

-- Allow ourselves to write Text literals.
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

data Coord = Coord { x :: Double, y :: Double }

instance ToJSON Coord where
  toJSON (Coord x y) = object ["x" .= x, "y" .= y]

  toEncoding (Coord x y) = pairs ("x" .= x <> "y" .= y)

Instead of manually writing your ToJSON instance, there are two options to do it automatically:

• Data.Aeson.TH provides Template Haskell functions which will derive an instance at compile time. The generated instance is optimized for your type so it will probably be more efficient than the following option.

• The compiler can provide a default generic implementation for toJSON.

To use the second, simply add a deriving Generic clause to your datatype and declare a ToJSON instance. If you require nothing other than defaultOptions, it is sufficient to write (and this is the only alternative where the default toJSON implementation is sufficient):

{-# LANGUAGE DeriveGeneric #-}

import GHC.Generics

data Coord = Coord { x :: Double, y :: Double } deriving Generic

instance ToJSON Coord where
    toEncoding = genericToEncoding defaultOptions

or more conveniently using the DerivingVia extension

deriving via Generically Coord instance ToJSON Coord

If on the other hand you wish to customize the generic decoding, you have to implement both methods:

customOptions = defaultOptions
                { fieldLabelModifier = map toUpper
                }

instance ToJSON Coord where
    toJSON     = genericToJSON customOptions
    toEncoding = genericToEncoding customOptions

Previous versions of this library only had the toJSON method. Adding toEncoding had two reasons:

1. toEncoding is more efficient for the common case that the output of toJSON is directly serialized to a ByteString. Further, expressing either method in terms of the other would be non-optimal.

2. The choice of defaults allows a smooth transition for existing users: Existing instances that do not define toEncoding still compile and have the correct semantics. This is ensured by making the default implementation of toEncoding use toJSON. This produces correct results, but since it performs an intermediate conversion to a Value, it will be less efficient than directly emitting an Encoding. (this also means that specifying nothing more than instance ToJSON Coord would be sufficient as a generically decoding instance, but there probably exists no good reason to not specify toEncoding in new instances.)