[Catalyst] need JSON converter which supports unquoted strings

[Jason Kohles]

On Nov 19, 2007, at 9:20 AM, Moritz Onken wrote:

> Hi,
>
> sorry, a bit off topic, but I'm looking for a perl-object-to-JSON
> converter which supports unquoted strings.
> Modules like JSON::Any quote everything except true and false. But I
> need to pass unquoted strings to let JavaScript run some functions.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
Not sure if it will help in your application, but I ran into a similar  
issue recently with trying to generate a javascript data structure to  
define a cascading menu (which would get turned into menus for the  
ExtJS toolbar object.)  One of the elements in the data structure  
needed to be a javascript callback that should be run when the menu  
option was selected.  I wanted to have an 'href' field in my objects  
that defined the location the user should be redirected to when they  
picked that menu item.  The way I handled it was to use JSON::XS which  
lets you define a TO_JSON method for objects that are being  
serialized, and then post-processed the output a little bit...

sub TO_JSON {
	my ( $self ) = @_;

	my %hash = %{ $self };

	# Here we wrap XXX-HANDLER() around the value that
	# is in the handler field of the object
	$hash{ 'handler' } = "XXX-HANDLER(".delete( $hash{ 'href' } ).")";

	return \%hash;
}

sub render {
	my ( $self ) = @_;

	my $json = JSON::XS->new->ascii->convert_blessed;
	my $out = $json->encode( [ $self->children ] );
	$out =~ s/"XXX-HANDLER\((.*?)\)/function() 
{document.location.href='$1'}/g;

	return "var mainMenuItems = $out;";	
}


It's a little kludgy, but it works.  I'm probably going to write this  
whole package up as a blog entry, if anybody is interested in it.  The  
reason for this was to allow controllers to register the menu items  
for their actions, and have a cascading menu built automatically from  
the controllers.

-- 
Jason Kohles, RHCA RHCDS RHCE
email at jasonkohles.com - http://www.jasonkohles.com/
"A witty saying proves nothing."  -- Voltaire