Json Provider should not flatten structure

hi, I’m playing around with cfg4j and as we’re using JSON in our current setup I’d like to continue using it. However, much of the point of using json is lost if you can’t use arrays and objects (and arrays of objects) - particularly when the flattening produces strange results - e.g. "key": [{"innerKey": "value"}] fattens to just “key”: “value”

is there a particular reason why structures are flattened? The consumer of the configuration can be expected to know about the general structure of the configuration, no?

[erikwiborg]

sure, this is the one i’ve been using:

{
"moduleName": "name",
"seeds": ["one", "two", "three"],
"databases": [
  {
    "host": "localhost", 
    "port": 27017    
  }]
} 

thanks!

[kofrasa]

You could enforce a convention in a java properties file to represent arrays or objects. The example above can be written as

moduleName=name
seeds.$0=one
seeds.$1=two
seeds.$2=three
databases.$0.host=localhost
databases.$0.port=27017

Am prefixing the number with $ to safe guard against user input that make use of numeric keys. You can also provide a Cf4gProperties class which extends Properties to facilitates retrieving the nested values.

cf4gProps.getCfgProperty("databases", 0, "host"); // return value for "database.$0.host"
cf4gProps.getProperty("database.$0.host"); // equivalent to above