Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Extra functions needed

I'm trying to collect a list of things that people need for handling JSON, particularly in generating JSON.

For example, Josh gave me this little problem yesterday:

given: 
serial | name | type 
847001 | t15 | GE1043 
847002 | t16 | GE1043 
847003 | sub-alpha | GESS90 

I want to produce: 
  { "turbines" : 
    { 
       847001 : { "name" : "t15", "type" : "GE1043" }, 
       847002 : { "name" : "t16", "type" : "GE1043" }, 
       847003 : { "name" : "sub-alpha", "type" : "GESS90" } 
    } 
  }

I think this is going to call for a small addition to the json_build package, a json object aggregator. With that we'd be able to do this with:

select json_build_object("turbines",
        json_object_agg(serial, json_build_object("name",name,"type",type)))
from mytable;

Probably we'd want a similar aggregator for arrays. This would be different from the builtin json_agg function which takes a record as its argument and always produces an array of hashes.

3 comments:

  1. I make heavy use of JSONSelect, which I either use in my middleware layer or as a custom function in PLV8. I'd love it if this, or some similar query mechanism, was integrated into postgres. Is there something like this coming down the pipeline?

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  2. I have a situation where I am generating GeoJSON data via Postgis but need to merge in additional info from other columns with regular data types into the final generated JSON.

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  3. I would very much like a function to replace a subobject of a JSON document with a new one, something like:

    json_replace_path(from_json json, path text[], new_object json);

    This would enable modifying (potentially large) JSON documents stored in Postgres without having to ship the whole doucment back and forth to the client.

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