Thank you for your detailed answer. I appreciate the suggestion of introducing a second adapter/service that extracts the data from the file and transforms it into an appropriate format. That approach makes sense and clarifies part of the structure.

However, I still have a question regarding your proposed structure. In Clean Architecture, adapters typically reside in the third layer, not in the outermost layer. The API service, which makes the API request, belongs to the outermost layer—the Infrastructure layer.

What I don’t quite understand is how the adapter would know how to process or transform the data without knowing the structure of the returned JSON object. It’s not just about knowing the data format (e.g., JSON), but about understanding how the JSON object is structured—its keys, nested objects, and overall schema. The adapter would need this knowledge in order to map or iterate over the data correctly.

This creates a potential conflict: either the API layer must perform some kind of preprocessing or transformation so that the adapter can work with a standardized format, or the adapter must have specific knowledge of the API’s response structure, which would tightly couple it to the outermost layer.

How do you envision this being handled in Clean Architecture? How can the separation of layers be maintained effectively in this scenario, while ensuring the adapter has the necessary information to process the data correctly? I’d appreciate any insights or recommendations on this.