Best way to store data in BoltDB

Gon picture Gon · Mar 31, 2016 · Viewed 8k times · Source

I am new to BoltDB and Golang, and trying to get your help.

So, I understand that I can only save byte array ([]byte) for key and value of BoltDB. If I have a struct of user as below, and key will be the username, what would be the best choice to store the data into BoltDB where it expects array of bytes?

Serializing it or JSON? Or better way?

type User struct {
    name string
    age  int
    location string
    password string
    address string 
}

Thank you so much, have a good evening

Answer

Matthew Rankin picture Matthew Rankin · Mar 31, 2016

Yes, I would recommend marshaling the User struct to JSON and then use a unique key []byte slice. Don't forget that marshaling to JSON only includes the exported struct fields, so you'll need to change your struct as shown below.

For another example, see the BoltDB GitHub page.

type User struct {
    Name string
    Age  int
    Location string
    Password string
    Address string 
}

func (user *User) save(db *bolt.DB) error {
    // Store the user model in the user bucket using the username as the key.
    err := db.Update(func(tx *bolt.Tx) error {
        b, err := tx.CreateBucketIfNotExists(usersBucket)
        if err != nil {
            return err
        }    

        encoded, err := json.Marshal(user)
        if err != nil {
            return err
        }
        return b.Put([]byte(user.Name), encoded)
    })
    return err
}