jsonizer

jsonize

Keep your JSON structures versioned

Problem:

• You are working with jsons to structure your content (for instance, default settings for your web application stored in the localstorage).
• You modify this structure, but the old structure saved in localstorage breaks the functionality of your web application.
• You have to modify manually the saved structure, or delete it in order to generate the new structure

Solution:

• You create different versions of your data structure.
• Everytime you create a new version, you save it in a configuration file (.json)
• If you have an old version stored, jsonize updates your stored data to fit the new version (or new versions)

Documentation:

(under construction)

Download

$ npm install json-ize (--save-dev)

Import

var jsonize = require('jsonize')

Configuration

jsonize.init()

It creates a jsonize.json file with the default minimum configuration in the same path. If you pass a path to your config file, jsonize will use that configuration.

jsonize.init('mypath/myconfig.json')

Default minimum configuration:

{
  "structure": {
    "version": "0.1.0"
  },
  "versions": {
    "0.1.0": {
      "date": "2015-12-11T11:56:36.848Z", //date in ISOString format
      "description": "",
      "add": {},
      "delete": [],
      "modify": {}
    }
  }
}

Usage

• You receive a data structure. This data structure must have a version field

// 'loadedStructure' contains the data you had stored
jsonize.set.structure(loadedStructure)
//loadedStructure is saved in the config structure
jsonize.update.last()
//update the structure to the last version in the config file

jsonize.update.last always updates the current last version also, so you can modify structure changes without creating a new version. It also works recursively, so if your stored structure was 0.1.0 and last version is 0.3.0, but there was a version 0.2.0, it will update from 0.1.0 to 0.2.0 and then to 0.3.0.

• You want to create a new version

You can do it by using:

jsonize.set.new(structure, version) 

Where 'version' follows semver syntax

When adding a new version, the previous version should look like:

  "versions": {
    "0.1.0": {
      "date": "2015-12-11T11:56:36.848Z", //date in ISOString format
      "description": "",
      "add": {},
      "delete": [],
      "modify": {},
      "next":"patch"
    },
    "0.1.1": {
      "date": "2015-12-11T11:56:36.848Z", //date in ISOString format
      "description": "",
      "add": {},
      "delete": [],
      "modify": {}
    }
  }

As you can see, I added the attribute 'next' to the previous version, which contains the semver syntax that will be used to know the next version structure.

Tests

To execute the tests, run:

$ npm test