How To Work with JSON in an OutSystems App

[@guptalife13]

Do you offer the JSONData extension for people to use? I can only find ardoJSON.

[@outsystems]

Not clear what you mean by JSONData extension? The video talks about JSON data in the generic sense, but that's just a way of expressing data records using JavaScript notation. Can you elaborate?

[@joaomelo9210]

Why would you do a loop in the details screen as you already have the CustomerId. Just pass it as a parameter and filter in the aggregate. It is a much better solution performance-wise. Even so, good video.

[@outsystems]

Andrew here...May not have been clear, but what's being passed to the details screen is not an Entity Identifier. It's a text ID that's embedded in the JSON data itself. So in order to match that up, we need the loop in the preparation. You could certainly architect this in a different way if you wanted to import the JSON and store it locally, but given the use case I'm illustrating, looping over the records is how I chose to match up the input parameter with the ID value embedded in the JSON. If you knew that your ID would be unique in your external data, you could also potentially set up a filter on the JSON attribute, but when dealing with data that's not in your control, you have to be careful about such assumptions. Thanks for pointing it out, though. Glad you liked the video!

[@victorgasparoni]

@@outsystems I believe you could've ended the loop as soon as you find the customer id.

[@kiliancroese]

​@@outsystems I had the very same idea as @ João Melo. Even in this case it is absolutely not necessary to retrieve the entire list. The video shows that the CustomerData entity also has an id attribute. So we really should be passing that id to the detail screen and retrieve only one record. I don't think that it is really clear for everybody, especially novice developers, that doing it as shown is really a bad idea. I think training video's like these should not show bad practices.

[@outsystems]

Thanks for the feedback...appreciate the suggestion.