I am using Golang Revel for some web project and I did like 12 projects in that so far. In all of them I have a lot of code redundancy because of return types. Look at this two functions:
func (c Helper) Brands() []*models.Brand{
//do some select on rethinkdb and populate correct model
var brands []*models.Brand
rows.All(&brands)
return brands
}
func (c Helper) BlogPosts() []*models.Post{
//do some select on rethinkdb and populate correct model
var posts []*models.Post
rows.All(&posts)
return posts
}
As you can see they they both returns same type of data (type struct). My idea was just to pass string var like this:
func (c Helper) ReturnModels(modelName string) []*interface{} {
//do rethinkdb select with modelName and return []*interface{} for modelName
}
Like this I can have just one helper for returning data types instead of doing same thing over and over again for different models but same data type.
My questions are:
Yes it's possible however your function should return interface{}
and not []*interface
.
func (c Helper) ReturnModels(modelName string) interface{} {}
In this case you could use Type Switches and/or Type Assertions to cast the return value into it's original type.
Example
Note: I've never used Revel, but the following snippet should give you an a general idea:
package main
import "fmt"
type Post struct {
Author string
Content string
}
type Brand struct {
Name string
}
var database map[string]interface{}
func init() {
database = make(map[string]interface{})
brands := make([]Brand, 2)
brands[0] = Brand{Name: "Gucci"}
brands[1] = Brand{Name: "LV"}
database["brands"] = brands
posts := make([]Post, 1)
posts[0] = Post{Author: "J.K.R", Content: "Whatever"}
database["posts"] = posts
}
func main() {
fmt.Println("List of Brands: ")
if brands, ok := ReturnModels("brands").([]Brand); ok {
fmt.Printf("%v", brands)
}
fmt.Println("\nList of Posts: ")
if posts, ok := ReturnModels("posts").([]Post); ok {
fmt.Printf("%v", posts)
}
}
func ReturnModels(modelName string) interface{} {
return database[modelName]
}