Question

I have a fairly complex nested object, for example:

A = {b : {c : { d : [{e:false},{g:true}] } } }

And through some algorithm I have found d

Now I have a clone of A, Z = clone(A)

I want to be able to modify the d in Z. How can I somehow store the position of d, so that I can go to that position in Z and modify it. If this were a list I could just store the index and modify at the same index. I could of course search the tree for d, but I cannot assume unique property names, and even if I could this would be slow

Any ideas?

Answer 1

While your algorithm finds d, create a collection of properties to specify how d can be found. In this case, it would look like so

["b", "c", "d"]

Then you can loop through the collection to traverse Z for the clone of d:

properties = ["b", "c", "d"];
newD = Z;
for(var i = 0; i < properties.length; i++){
  newD = newD[properties[i]];
}