[Question]: omitempty for slices results in a dirty dashboard state in Grafana v10.4.1

[olehholovko-stripe]

What do you need?

Hi!

I'm using Golang structs to json.Unmarshal a Grafana v10.4.1 dashboard JSON, make some changes to the dashboard, json.Marshal it and upload the new dashboard back to Grafana. I noticed that Grafana v10.4.1 keeps empty lists in the JSON as is (e.g. "links": []). However, if I do json.Unmarshal into a variable of type Dashboard and then json.Marshal, empty lists are no longer present in the JSON (for example, Dashboard.Links or Dashboard.Tags, but also applicable to any slices in other structs used in Dashboard). This is because of the omitempty in the json tags.

Why it's problematic? If I then upload the JSON to Grafana and refresh a dashboard UI, the dashboard is in a dirty state: clicking on Save dashboard button shows multiple outstanding changes, primarily to add those empty lists back to the JSON.

Are there specific reasons to have omitempty for slices and is it possible to remove them?

Thanks,
Oleh

[spinillos]

The omitempty is added when the schema defines these fields as optional. Do you have a minimal example to test it and try to find a solution?