I’m currently developing the backendservices for our new absenceplanner. We submit all data to a rest service (CustomRestService in the ExtLib). So this service should be able to parse an array of json data. The data has the following format:

{
“dates”:[
{“div”:”dt20120827″,”dt”:”27.08.2012″,”metadata”:{“absenceType”:”Holiday”,”allDay”:true}},
{“div”:”dt20120829″,”dt”:”29.08.2012″,”metadata”:{“absenceType”:”Compensation”,”allDay”:true}}
],
“reqTitle”:”meine wohlverdienten ferien”,
“method”:”request.submit”
}

To parse the stream in to a JsonJavaObject I’ve used:

JsonJavaFactory factory = JsonJavaFactory.instanceEx;
Reader r = request.getReader();
json = (JsonJavaObject) JsonParser.fromJson(factory, r);
String strMethod = json.getString(“method”);

It’s very easy to extract all properties. An object can also be accessed with json.getJsonObject(“name”) . But no arrays. There is no getter.

But, how did others (like the ExtLib programmers) solve this? With this question I’ve read the code of the “twitter parsing” in the sbt of the ExtLib. And I found the solution in the com.ibm.xsp.extlib.sbt.services.client.DataNavigator class, which guides me to the following code:

Object arrDates = factory.getProperty(json, “dates”);
for (Iterator<Object> itDate = factory.iterateArrayValues(arrDates); itDate.hasNext();) {

JsonJavaObject jsDate = (JsonJavaObject)itDate.next();
//-> here do all the funny stuff with the jsDate object.
}

Thanks to Philippe Riand (IBM) for sharing your code. Its so inspiring to read your code.