What this the best way to ignore unwanted fields in a JSON payload from a PUT/PATCH using Golang?

Question

I have a situation where people consuming our API will need to do a partial update in my resource. I understand that the HTTP clearly specifies that this is a PATCH operation, even though people on our side are used to send a PUT request for this and that's how the legacy code is built.

For exemplification, imagine the simple following struct:

type Person struct {
    Name string
    Age int
    Address string
}

On a POST request, I will provide a payload with all three values (Name, Age, Address) and validate them accordingly on my Golang backend. Simple.

On a PUT/PATCH request though, we know that, for instance, a name never changes. But say I would like to change the age, then I would simply send a JSON payload containing the new age:

PUT /person/1 {age:30}

Now to my real question: What is the best practice to prevent name from being used/updated intentionally or unintentionally modified in case a consumer of our API send a JSON payload containing the name field?

Example:

PUT /person/1 {name:"New Name", age:35} 

Possible solutions I thought of, but I don't actually like them, are:

1. On my validator method, I would either forcibly remove the unwanted field name OR respond with an error message saying that name is not allowed.

2. Create a DTO object/struct that would be pretty much an extension of my Person struct and then unmarshall my JSON payload into it, for instance

   type PersonPut struct { Age int Address string }

In my opinion this would add needless extra code and logic to abstract the problem, however I don't see any other elegant solution.

I honestly don't like those two approaches and I would like to know if you guys faced the same problem and how you solved it.

Thanks!

Answer 1

The first solution your brought is a good one. Some well known frameworks use to implement similar logic.

As an example, latests Rails versions come with a built in solution to prevent users to add extra data in the request, causing the server to update wrong fields in database. It is a kind of whitelist implemented by ActionController::Parameters class.

Let's suppose we have a controller class as bellow. For purpose of this explanation, it contains two update actions. But you won't see it in real code.

class PeopleController < ActionController::Base

  # 1st version - Unsafe, it will rise an exception. Don't do it
  def update
    person = current_account.people.find(params[:id])
    person.update!(params[:person])
    redirect_to person
  end

  # 2nd version - Updates only permitted parameters
  def update
    person = current_account.people.find(params[:id])
    person.update!(person_params) # call to person_params method
    redirect_to person
  end


  private

  def person_params
    params.require(:person).permit(:name, :age)
  end

end

Since the second version allows only permitted values, it'll block the user to change the payload and send a JSON containing a new password value:

{ name: "acme", age: 25, password: 'account-hacked' }

For more details, see Rails docs: Action Controller Overview and ActionController::Parameters

Answer 2

If the name cannot be written it is not valid to provide it for any update request. I would reject the request if the name was present. If I wanted to be more lenient, I might consider only rejecting the request if name is different from the current name.

I would not silently ignore a name which was different from the current name.

Answer 3

This can be solved by decoding the JSON body into a map[string]json.RawMessage first. The json.RawMessage type is useful for delaying the actual decoding. Afterwards, a whitelist can be applied on the map[string]json.RawMessage map, ignoring unwanted properties and only decoding the json.RawMessages of the properties we want to keep.

The process of decoding the whitelisted JSON body into a struct can be automated using the reflect package; an example implementation can be found here.

Answer 4

I am not proficient on Golang but I believe a good strategy would be converting your name field to be a read-only field.

For instance, in a strictly object-oriented language as Java/.NET/C++ you can just provide a Getter but not a Setter.

Maybe there is some accessor configuration for Golang just like Ruby has....

If it is read-only then it shouldn't bother with receiving a spare value, it should just ignore it. But again, not sure if Golang supports it.

Answer 5

I think the clean way is to put this logic inside the PATCH handler. There should be some logic that would update only the fields that you want. Is easier if you unpack into a map[string]string and only iterate over the fields that you want to update. Additionally you could decode the json into a map, delete all the fields that you don't want to be updated, re-encode in json and then decode into your struct.