Is it possible to use less `struct`s in this golang code?

Question

Given the following XML which is out of my control:

  <Stuff>
  <SomeData>
    <SomeDataStuff>
      <AccountDetails>
        <Person xsi:nil="true" />
        <Person xsi:nil="true" />
      </AccountDetails>
      <CandidateDetails>
        <Candidate xsi:nil="true" />
        <Candidate xsi:nil="true" />
      </CandidateDetails>
    </SomeDataStuff>
  </SomeData>
  </Stuff>

I am able to unmarshal using the following, can it be simplified somewhat?

 type Stuff struct {
         XMLName  xml.Name
         SomeData SomeData
 }

 type SomeData struct {
         XMLName       xml.Name
         SomeDataStuff SomeDataStuff
 }

type SomeDataStuff struct {
         AccountDetails   AccountDetails   `xml:"AccountDetails"`
         CandidateDetails CandidateDetails `xml:"CandidateDetails"`
}

 type AccountDetails struct {
         Person   []Person
 }       

 type CandidateDetails struct {
         Candidate []Candidate
 }       

 type Person struct {
         ...
 }       

 type Candidate struct {
         ...
 }       

Im not worried about marshalling, just unmarshalling. Really all I need is an array of Person and Candidate , not a whole sequence of nested pointless struct's

Answer 1

You can use a selector, for example:

// replace []string with []Person/[]Candidate
type Stuff struct {
    People     []string `xml:"SomeData>SomeDataStuff>AccountDetails>Person"`
    Candidates []string `xml:"SomeData>SomeDataStuff>CandidateDetails>Candidate"`
}

//edit, I updated the example to show that marshalling also works fine.

playground

From http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/xml/#Unmarshal :

* If the XML element contains a sub-element whose name matches
   the prefix of a tag formatted as "a" or "a>b>c", unmarshal
   will descend into the XML structure looking for elements with the
   given names, and will map the innermost elements to that struct
   field. A tag starting with ">" is equivalent to one starting
   with the field name followed by ">".