title: deserializing multiple types with gson
body: <p>I receive the following JSON response from my http web service</p>
  
  <pre><code>{"status":100,"data":[{"name":"kitchen chair","price":25.99,"description":null}]}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Now I want to be able to deserialize this. I stumbled upon Gson from Google, which at first worked well for some small testcases but I'm having some trouble getting the above string deserialized.</p>
  
  <p>I know the <code>data</code> field only has one item in it, but it could hold more than one which is why all responses have the <code>data</code> field as an array.</p>
  
  <p>I was reading the <a href="https://sites.google.com/site/gson/gson-user-guide" rel="nofollow">Gson User Guide</a> and ideally I would like to have a <code>Response</code> object which has two attributes: <code>status</code> and <code>data</code>, but the <code>data</code> field would have to be a <code>List</code> of <code>Map</code> objects which presumably is making it hard for Gson.</p>
  
  <p>I then looked at <a href="http://code.google.com/p/google-gson/source/browse/trunk/extras/src/main/java/com/google/gson/extras/examples/rawcollections/RawCollectionsExample.java" rel="nofollow">this</a> which is an example closer to my problem but I still can't quite figure it out. In the example the whole response is an array, whereas my JSON string has one string element and then an array.</p>
  
  <p>How would I best go about deserializing this?</p>