JSON at Work

Chapter 7. JSON Transform

Your application(s) may take in data from multiple APIs, and you’ll often need to convert their JSON response data to a format that integrates with your application architecture.

Many JSON Transform technologies enable you to convert between a JSON document and other data formats (e.g., HTML or XML) or a different JSON structure. Many developers will be familiar with some of these libraries (e.g., Mustache and Handlebars), but we’ll show how to use them in nontraditional ways (more on that later). We’ll also cover libraries (e.g., JSON-T) that are not well-known to the community at large, but are commonly used by members of the JSON community.

Types of JSON Transformation

Typical types of transformations include the following:

JSON-to-HTML

Many web and mobile applications have to handle JSON data from APIs, and this is the most common type of JSON transformation.

JSON-to-JSON

Sometimes the JSON response from a Web API isn’t quite what you’re looking for, and you’d like to change the format of the data to make it easier to work with. In this case, you can alter the structure by modifying values and/or removing, adding, and deleting fields. Some of the libraries are analogous to eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) for XML (which is used to transform XML documents) in that they use a separate template to describe the transformation.

JSON-XML

SOAP/XML-based Web Services still exist, and sometimes you need to consume XML and convert ...