Question

My Json array looks like this:

var data =
{
    "categories": 
    {
        "category1": 
        {
            "Name": "Maps",
             "Id": 3,
             "orderInList": 1
        },
        "category2": 
        {
            "Name": "Books",
            "Id": 2,
            "orderInList": 2
        }
    }
};

When I write do console.log(data), the ‘key’ to the object is formatted like:

|         key           |    value  |

categories[category1][Id]     "3"

How can I iterate over this in a for loop (without using JQuery’s $.each) so I can tell which key, value pairs are Names, Id’s or orderInList’s?

Working Jsfiddle

Answer 1

Something like this should work:

for (var category in data['categories']) {
    for (var key in data['categories'][category]) {
        var value = data['categories'][category][key];

        // Now do whatever you want based on key...
        switch (key) {
           case 'Name':
              // Whatever
              break;
           default:
              break;
        }
    }
}

In any case, key and value in the inner loop will hold the key and value of your nested object, and category will hold the category.

The potentially confusing thing about this is that object properties can be accessed like array values in Javascript.

So consider the code below:

var some_object = {
    a: 0
};

// These two lines do the same thing, even though some_object is not an array.
some_object.a = 1;
some_object['a'] = 1;