I have a question related to this which nobody has really touched on yet.
Imagine you have a json structure like this:
{"records" : [
{"name":"joe",
...lots of other fields in each record},
{"name":"fred",
...lots of other fields},
... thousands of records
]}
Now a lot of people in this thread have mentioned tools for collapsing the json, but the trouble I have with this is that you can't browse the record names without opening each one and looking at all the fields. It would be nice if there was a tool that took a few key identifiers (name, id) and "bubbled them up" so that in a collapsed view you would see something like:
{"records":[
{...click to expand...}, // name=joe
{...click to expand...}, // name=fred
]}
I have the same problem when working with XML as well (though in XML sometimes the ID's are attributes of the parent which mitigates the problem, but other times the ID would be nested in a child element of the structure more like you would have in json). I even found it to be enough of a problem that I wrote my own XML editor to solve this issue.
Of course one issue with this is that there's so clear standard as to which fields of an object represent "ID" information which would be important/useful to "bubble up" to the next level when collapsing. It would have to be something user-configurable (though having some sensible defaults like looking for "name" and "id" keys would work in a lot of cases). In the XML world, there's probably something to do with Schemas that would help with this problem, and fancy editors which understand your data using a schema, though some of the editors I looked at which went into that level of detail seemed like way overkill for what i wanted to do.
So essentially my question here is whether this concept of "collapse child, but keep important identifying information of the collapsed child visible" exists in any json tools? is this a thing that has a name/buzzword associated with it that I don't know about? or is it purely an issue that's my own personal quirk which nobody else cares about?
That data structure is basically a CSV file.
If I were you, I would convert the JSON to a CSV file, load it into excel and use a pivot table dive into your data and convert it back if needed.
A pivot table will do exactly what you want and more.
If you hate excel, You could load it into a database and do a groupby query.
I suspect most JSON in that data structure were auto generated from CSV files or database anyways.
Another option is to just convert that JSON to another JSON keyed by name with Lodash then inspect it.
Imagine you have a json structure like this:
{"records" : [ {"name":"joe", ...lots of other fields in each record}, {"name":"fred", ...lots of other fields}, ... thousands of records ]}
Now a lot of people in this thread have mentioned tools for collapsing the json, but the trouble I have with this is that you can't browse the record names without opening each one and looking at all the fields. It would be nice if there was a tool that took a few key identifiers (name, id) and "bubbled them up" so that in a collapsed view you would see something like:
{"records":[ {...click to expand...}, // name=joe {...click to expand...}, // name=fred ]}
I have the same problem when working with XML as well (though in XML sometimes the ID's are attributes of the parent which mitigates the problem, but other times the ID would be nested in a child element of the structure more like you would have in json). I even found it to be enough of a problem that I wrote my own XML editor to solve this issue.
Of course one issue with this is that there's so clear standard as to which fields of an object represent "ID" information which would be important/useful to "bubble up" to the next level when collapsing. It would have to be something user-configurable (though having some sensible defaults like looking for "name" and "id" keys would work in a lot of cases). In the XML world, there's probably something to do with Schemas that would help with this problem, and fancy editors which understand your data using a schema, though some of the editors I looked at which went into that level of detail seemed like way overkill for what i wanted to do.
So essentially my question here is whether this concept of "collapse child, but keep important identifying information of the collapsed child visible" exists in any json tools? is this a thing that has a name/buzzword associated with it that I don't know about? or is it purely an issue that's my own personal quirk which nobody else cares about?