Haskell Language Data.Aeson - JSON in Haskell Smart Encoding and Decoding using Generics
Example
The easiest and quickest way to encode a Haskell data type to JSON with Aeson is using generics.
{-# LANGUAGE DeriveGeneric #-}
import GHC.Generics
import Data.Text
import Data.Aeson
import Data.ByteString.Lazy
First let us create a data type Person:
data Person = Person { firstName :: Text
, lastName :: Text
, age :: Int
} deriving (Show, Generic)
In order to use the encode and decode function from the Data.Aeson package we need to make Person an instance of ToJSON and FromJSON. Since we derive Generic for Person, we can create empty instances for these classes. The default definitions of the methods are defined in terms of the methods provided by the Generic type class.
instance ToJSON Person
instance FromJSON Person
Done! In order to improve the encoding speed we can slightly change the ToJSON instance:
instance ToJSON Person where
toEncoding = genericToEncoding defaultOptions
Now we can use the encode function to convert Person to a (lazy) Bytestring:
encodeNewPerson :: Text -> Text -> Int -> ByteString
encodeNewPerson first last age = encode $ Person first last age
And to decode we can just use decode:
> encodeNewPerson "Hans" "Wurst" 30
"{\"lastName\":\"Wurst\",\"age\":30,\"firstName\":\"Hans\"}"
> decode $ encodeNewPerson "Hans" "Wurst" 30
Just (Person {firstName = "Hans", lastName = "Wurst", age = 30})
