Documentation

The class of monoids (types with an associative binary operation that has an identity). Instances should satisfy the following laws:

• mappend mempty x = x

• mappend x mempty = x

• mappend x (mappend y z) = mappend (mappend x y) z

• mconcat = foldr mappend mempty

The method names refer to the monoid of lists under concatenation, but there are many other instances.

Minimal complete definition: mempty and mappend.

Some types can be viewed as a monoid in more than one way, e.g. both addition and multiplication on numbers. In such cases we often define newtypes and make those instances of Monoid, e.g. Sum and Product.

A type that can be converted to JSON.

An example type and instance:

@{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

data Coord = Coord { x :: Double, y :: Double }

instance ToJSON Coord where toJSON (Coord x y) = object ["x" .= x, "y" .= y] @

Note the use of the OverloadedStrings language extension which enables Text values to be written as string literals.

Instead of manually writing your ToJSON instance, there are three options to do it automatically:

• Data.Aeson.TH provides template-haskell functions which will derive an instance at compile-time. The generated instance is optimized for your type so will probably be more efficient than the following two options:
• Data.Aeson.Generic provides a generic toJSON function that accepts any type which is an instance of Data.
• If your compiler has support for the DeriveGeneric and DefaultSignatures language extensions (GHC 7.2 and newer), toJSON will have a default generic implementation.

To use the latter option, simply add a deriving Generic clause to your datatype and declare a ToJSON instance for your datatype without giving a definition for toJSON.

For example the previous example can be simplified to just:

@{-# LANGUAGE DeriveGeneric #-}

import GHC.Generics

data Coord = Coord { x :: Double, y :: Double } deriving Generic

instance ToJSON Coord @

Note that, instead of using DefaultSignatures, it's also possible to parameterize the generic encoding using genericToJSON applied to your encoding/decoding Options:

instance ToJSON Coord where
    toJSON = genericToJSON defaultOptions