Question

Basically, I’m working on a page that includes four different JSON “thingies” (objetcs,arrays). Forgive my lack of proper terminology.

When I get the JSON, it comes in as an object with a bunch of sub-objects, and each “sub-object” looks like this:

"token":"government",
"title":"Government",
"isSelected":false,
"type":"CATEGORY",
"subtype":"INDUSTRY",
"count":12

So the first task is to loop through each JSON and populate a box full of checkboxes, using the title as the label and the isSelected to indicate the checked status. So far, so good.

BTW, somewhere aslong the way, I picked up a JS script that checks whether an object is JSON or an array, and according to that “quick & dirty” test, my object is an array. Or an array object (you know, the one is created with [ ] and the other with { })?

Anyway, when the end user checks and un-checks checkboxes, I need to keep track of it all and immediately send back changes to the server (when the user clicks a DONE button). The crazy thing is that by looping through the objects, I was able to change the isSelected value to true . . . just not back to false.

for(var i = 0; i < $array.length; i++){
    $array[z].isSelected = true;
}

Perhaps I was up too late when I worked on all of this, but using the same approach, I could not change $array[z].isSelected to false when the checkbox got de-selected.

In the end, I converted the JSON “thingy” to a string, search and replaced the corresponding values, and then converted the string back into an object. This is all working now, but I feel as though I’ve just used up a roll of duct tape on something that could have been put together by snapping the pieces together nicely.

Question: Did I miss the boat totally and is there a simple way to change values of JSON objects?

If so, could you point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

That JSON thingy is just a string representation of a javascript object.

One way of creating an object is

var myObject = {
    "myName": "AName",
    "myType": "AType"
};

This object can be referenced as myObject, with the properties myObject.myName and myObject.myType containing values AName and AType.

You should be able to just reference the object by name as objName.token objName.title etc.

If you have trouble try parsing the json with javascript then reference the result as above. This should make it easier for you to access, manipulate or delete data in the objects properties as well.

The nesting of these as below can be referenced as myObject.moreProperties.prop1 etc

var myObject = {
    "myName": "AName",
    "myType": "AType",
    "moreProperties": {
        "prop1": "vaue1",
        "prop2": "vaue2",
    }
};