Break a big JSON file into a hierarchy of directories and files

Combine-JSON

This module allows you to break a JSON file to a directory structure.

Why?Sometimes you have a huge JSON file with lots of nested objects.

git

Example

Given this JSON file:

my-data.json

{
    "name": "Alex Ewerlöf",
        "address": {
        "street": "Hittepågatan 13",
        "city": "Stockholm",
        "country": "Sweden",
        "zip": "11122"
    },
    "todos": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "title": "document the module",
        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "title": "write some tests",
        },
        {
            "id": 3,
            "title": "publish it for good",
        }
    ]
}

You can break it into several files like this:

my-data/name.json

"Alex Ewerlöf"

(Yes that's a perfectly valid input to JSON.parse() )

my-data/address.json

{
    "street": "Hittepågatan 13",
    "city": "Stockholm",
    "country": "Sweden",
    "zip": "11122"
}

my-data/todos.json

[
    {
        "id": 1,
        "title": "document the module",
    },
    {
        "id": 2,
        "title": "write some tests",
    },
    {
        "id": 3,
        "title": "publish it for good",
    }
]

You can write that array of objects into files as well:

my-data/todos/0.json

{
    "id": 1,
    "title": "document the module",
}

my-data/todos/1.json

{
    "id": 2,
    "title": "write some tests",
}

my-data/todos/2.json

{
    "id": 3,
    "title": "publish it for good",
}

So the file structure looks like this:

my-data/
    |____name.json
    |____address.json
    |____todos/
        |____0.json
        |____1.json
        |____2.json

Of course you can have directories for array elements as well:

my-data/
    |____name.json
    |____address.json
    |____todos/
        |____0/
        |    |____id.json
        |    |____title.json
        |____1.json
        |____2.json

Take a look at the test/my-data directory to see it in action.

Rules

• It ignores all files that don't have a .json extension (case insensitive)
• For a directory to represent an array, all its contents should be consecutive numericals starting with 0 . Example: ./0/ , ./1/ , ./2.json , ./3/ , ...
• The files can contain anything that JSON.parse() can understand: objects, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans.
• Optionally you can use JSON5 for parsing the files. This means you can have comments and a liberal syntax. You need to explicitly install the json5 package.

Usage

$ npm i combine-json

const { combine } = require('combine-json')

combine('path/to/roorDir').then(
    myJsonObj => console.dir(myJsonObj),
    error => console.error(error)
)

API

See the js docs online.

CLI

You can use the CLI for testing what the output may look like.

$ npx combine-json test/my-data/
{
    "address": {
        "street": "Hittepågatan 13",
        "city": "Stockholm",
        "country": "Sweden",
        "zip": "11122"
    },
    "name": "Alex Ewerlöf",
    "todos": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "title": "document the module"
        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "title": "write some tests"
        },
        {
            "id": 3,
            "title": "publish it for good"
        }
    ]
}

Made in Sweden by @alexewerlof