I have a protobuf message definition like this:

message MyThing {
  string foo = 1;
  int32 bar = 2;
}

And a Java/Kotlin API that returns a List<MyThing>

I need to format this as a JSON string, as follows:

[
    {
      "foo": "value1",
      "bar": 1,
    },
    {
      "foo": "value2",
      "bar": 2,
    },
    {
      "foo": "value3",
      "bar": 3,
    }
]

I know I can use JsonFormat to convert protobuf to JSON, however that only operates on a single message. So where I’m having difficulty is how to convert a list of messages to a properly formatted JSON array as shown in the example above without resorting to using string manipulation to manually format it myself.

I have briefly looked at using the Gson library but I’m not sure if this is the right approach.