Book Image

JavaScript and JSON Essentials

By : Sai S Sriparasa
Book Image

JavaScript and JSON Essentials

By: Sai S Sriparasa

Overview of this book

The exchange of data over the Internet has been carried out since its inception. Delimiter-separated lists such as CSV and tag-separated languages such as XML are very popular, yet they are considered to be verbose by a section of developers. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight text-based code to create objects to transfer data over the Internet. It is a data exchange format that is human-readable (like XML, but without the markup around your actual payload) and its syntax is a subset of the JavaScript language that was standardized in 1999. JavaScript and JSON Essentials is a step-by-step guide that will introduce you to JSON and help you understand how the lightweight JSON data format can be used in different ways either to store data locally or to transfer data over the Internet. This book will teach you how to use JSON effectively with JavaScript. This book begins with a brief refresher course on JavaScript before taking you through how JSON data can be transferred via synchronous, asynchronous, and cross-domain asynchronous HTTP calls. JSON is not just about data transfer; this book throws light on the alternate implementations of JSON as well. You will learn the data types that JavaScript uses and how those data types can be used in JSON. You will go through the concepts of how to create, update, parse, and delete a JSON object. You will also look at the different techniques of loading a JSON file onto a web page, how to use jQuery to traverse through an object, and how to perform access operations. You will also go over a few resources that will make debugging JSON quick and easy.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Performing complex operations


To tackle an array of objects, we have to handle them in an iterative method. We will have to come up with an iterative solution in which we target one object at a time; once the object is accessed, we would not target that object another time. This allows us to maintain data integrity as we can avoid accessing the same object multiple times, thereby avoiding any redundancies. The looping statements in JavaScript are the while loop and the for loop. Let us take a quick look at how we can use these looping techniques to traverse through our employees' array.

In the while_employees_traversal.html file, we are importing the data.js file, which we had examined in the previous section. The data_json variable inside the data.js file consists of an array of objects that are imported into this HTML page. In the script tags, we are setting up two variables: the i variable to hold a starting counter and the employeeCount variable to hold the counter of the total number...