Nested JSON result in Golang from Postgres

I'm using gin and gorp

The SQL:

SELECT p.project_id, p.name, 

COALESCE(NULLIF(json_agg(a.*)::TEXT, '[null]'), '[]')::JSON AS apps 

FROM project p LEFT JOIN app a USING (project_id) 

WHERE p.user_id=19 

GROUP BY p.project_id, p.name ORDER BY project_id

The results:

Golang

type Project struct {
	ID        int64           `db:"project_id, primarykey, autoincrement" json:"id"`
	UserID    int64           `db:"user_id" json:"user_id"`
	Name      string          `db:"name" json:"name"`
	Status    int             `db:"status" json:"status"`
	UpdatedAt int64           `db:"updated_at" json:"updated_at"`
	CreatedAt int64           `db:"created_at" json:"created_at"`
	Apps      json.RawMessage `json:"apps"`
}


func GetProjects(userID int64, page string) []Project {
	var projects []Project

	var err error
	_, err = db.GetDB().Select(&projects, "SELECT p.project_id, p.name, COALESCE(NULLIF(json_agg(a.*)::TEXT, '[null]'), '[]')::JSON AS apps FROM project p LEFT JOIN app a USING (project_id) WHERE p.user_id=$1 GROUP BY p.project_id, p.name ORDER BY project_id LIMIT 10 OFFSET $2", userID, page)
	fmt.Println("err", err)

	return projects
}

And returning the results using: c.JSON(200, gin.H{"data": projects})

It works if there's only one project

But if there's more than one project it gives the below error:

The error: json: error calling MarshalJSON for type json.RawMessage: invalid character '"' after top-level value

Any suggestions?

P.S: I'm a newbie in Golang

you can use this site http://json2struct.mervine.net/ to get right struct according to result. just copy select result, and generate your decent struct

or you can produce new type which have Project struct array:

type Projects []Project

I made it work using this solution below from this answer

> I don't know how clean of a solution this is but I ended up making my own data type JSONRaw. The DB driver sees it as a []btye but it can still be treated like a json.RawMessage in the Go Code.
>
> This is a copy paste reimplementation of MarshalJSON and UnmarshalJSON from the encoding/json library.

//JSONRaw ...
type JSONRaw json.RawMessage

//Value ...
func (j JSONRaw) Value() (driver.Value, error) {
    byteArr := []byte(j)

    return driver.Value(byteArr), nil
}

//Scan ...
func (j *JSONRaw) Scan(src interface{}) error {
    asBytes, ok := src.([]byte)
    if !ok {
        return error(errors.New("Scan source was not []bytes"))
    }
    err := json.Unmarshal(asBytes, &j)
    if err != nil {
        return error(errors.New("Scan could not unmarshal to []string"))
    }

    return nil
}

//MarshalJSON ...
func (j *JSONRaw) MarshalJSON() ([]byte, error) {
    return *j, nil
}

//UnmarshalJSON ...
func (j *JSONRaw) UnmarshalJSON(data []byte) error {
    if j == nil {
        return errors.New("json.RawMessage: UnmarshalJSON on nil pointer")
    }
    *j = append((*j)[0:0], data...)
    return nil
}

//Project ....
type Project struct {
    ID        int64   `db:"project_id, primarykey, autoincrement" json:"id"`
    UserID    int64   `db:"user_id" json:"user_id"`
    Name      string  `db:"name" json:"name"`
    Status    int     `db:"status" json:"status"`
    UpdatedAt int64   `db:"updated_at" json:"updated_at"`
    CreatedAt int64   `db:"created_at" json:"created_at"`
    Apps      JSONRaw `json:"apps"`
}

But I was wondering if there's a clean way other than this?

Hope this also help others.

I used the below link
https://www.alexedwards.net/blog/using-postgresql-jsonb

and
http://json2struct.mervine.net/

to make it work .
I was struggling for long time and then realized that the struct did the trick.