Clojure name binding to REST JSON data

Question

I'm a Frontend Engineer, our team is switching many of our old services to micro services written in clojure. The main issue I'm seeing is that clojure naming conventions prefer hyphens to-separate-words in variable names. This means if you straight map variables into JSON any JS consumer would need to access this data using bracket notation e.g. response['to-separate-words']. This is obviously not ideal. I thought this would be a easy best practice to lookup but I've been looking for an hour and it seems like all the docs I read avoid this issue but using single words. Has anyone else dealt with this.

Answer 1

You might use camel-snake-kebab library which supports most of the combinations. You can plug it in into most of the JSON libraries for Clojure (cheshire, cli-json, data.json - as mentioned by Elogent) as they usually have an option to provide a function for handling property name mangling.

For example with cheshire:

Generate JSON with camel case property names:

(cheshire.core/generate-string {:my-clojure-key "abc"} 
                               {:key-fn camel-snake-kebab.core/->camelCaseString})

Result:

{"myClojureKey":"abc"}

Parse JSON to get map with kebab case keys:

(cheshire.core/parse-string "{\"myClojureKey\":\"abc\"}" 
                            camel-snake-kebab.core/->kebab-case-keyword)

Result:

{:my-clojure-key "abc"}

There is also an example for data.json in camel-snake-kebab readme.