Question

I have an application that lets users build things in JS. I want the user to be able to save the current state of his work to reuse it or share it, but what he has is a collection of JS objects stored in a JS array, with very different properties (color, label, x/y position, size, etc.).

SQL seems terrible for that particular task, forcing me to maintain tables for every different object, and alas I know very little about NoSQL database. What tools would you use to perform this ? MongoDB sounds promising but before I learn a whole new DB paradigm I want to be sure that I am heading in the right direction.

Answer 1

Object to string:

You can store your objects in the DB as a JSON string. Here’s a simple example:

var foo = new Object();
foo.Name = "James";
foo.Gender = "Male";

//Result: {"Name":"James","Gender":"Male"}
var stringRepresentation = window.JSON.stringify(foo);

Here’s a working fiddle.

String to object:

To convert your string back to an object, simply call window.JSON.parse():

var myObject = window.JSON.parse(stringRepresentation);

Here’s a working fiddle.