Greetings programs,

Today I restarted work on my little go-based ISE utility after a long hiatus. It’s like going to the gym after a long absence. Some pain is involved. But I got something done! Just need to finish one task a day, and eventually, I’ll have a fully working tool. I’ll be rambling on about it here to give myself some accountability

The thing I was working on today (besides refamiliarizing myself with the code) was generalizing the API calls into one helper function. If you’re used to thinking like a Python programmer, the tricky part is you can’t just say, “Hey, give me back the JSON body, and I’ll dot into it to grab what I want”. This is because of Go’s strong typing. You have to model the JSON out as a struct ahead of time. Since each API call returns a different JSON data structure, you must have a separate function for each one. My solution was to split things up to have a generic function that will call an API endpoint, read the body into a byte slice, then pass that to another function that will unmarshal it into the struct that I can actually utilize.

It took a minute to figure all this out, but I got it to work.

Development branch: https://github.com/srmcnutt/ise-t/tree/development