Using JSON in Alfresco WebScripts

Programming, Technologies  · 

In my current project, we are using Alfresco for the content repository and all the extra functionalities required are developed using Webscripts. While working on one functionality, I had to serialize javascript objects to JSON and also deserialize it. For doing this, there is a nice javascript code on Alfresco Wiki for converting the object to JSON and vice versa. But to use it, you need to make some slight modifications to the code. The original code doesn’t generate proper JSON code and also has a syntax error in method to obtain the javascript object back from the JSON string. So here is the proper code for handling JSON:

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/*
   json.js
(modified 2006-09-07): added support for RHINO
(modified 2006-05-02): json.parse, json,stringify added
  USAGE:
  var jsObj = JSON.parse(jsonStr);
  var jsonStr = JSON.stringify(jsObj);
*/
if (!this.json) {
  var json = (function () {
      var m = {
              'b': 'b',
              't': 't',
              'n': 'n',
              'f': 'f',
              'r': 'r',
              '"' : '\"',
              '': ''
          },
          s = {
              array: function (x) {
                  var a = [], b, f, i, l = x.length, v;
                  for (i = 0; i < l; i += 1) {
                      v = x[i];
                      f = s[typeof v];
                      if (f) {
                          v = f(v);
                          if (typeof v == 'string') {
                              a[a.length] = v;
                              b = true;
                          }
                      }
                  }
                  return '['+a.join()+']';
              },
              'boolean': function (x) {
                  return String(x);
              },
              'null': function (x) {
                  return "null";
              },
              number: function (x) {
                  return isFinite(x) ? String(x) : 'null';
              },
              object: function (x) {
                  if (x) {

                      if (x instanceof Array) {
                          return s.array(x);
                      }
                      if (x.hashCode) return s.string(+x.toString());

                      var a = [], b, f, i, v;
                      for (i in x) {
                          v = x[i];
                          f = s[typeof v];
                          if (f) {

                              v = f(v);

                              if (typeof v == 'string') {
                                  a.push(""+s.string(i)+':'+ v+"");
                                  b = true;
                              }
                          }
                      }
                      return '{'+a.join()+'}';
                  }
                  return 'null';
              },
              string: function (x) {
                  if (/["x00-x1f]/.test(x)) {
                      x = x.replace(/([x00-x1f\"])/g, function(a, b) {
                          var c = m[b];
                          if (c) {
                              return c;
                          }
                          c = b.charCodeAt();
                          return 'u00' +
                              Math.floor(c / 16).toString(16) +
                              (c % 16).toString(16);
                      });
                  }
                  return '"' + x + '"';
              }
          };

     return {
        parse: function(s) {
           try {
              return !(/[^,:{}[]0-9.-+Eaeflnr-u nrt]/.test(s.replace(/"(.|[^"])*"/g,""))) && eval('(' + s + ')');
           } catch (e) {
              return false;
           }
        },
        stringify: s.object
     };
  })();
}

Here is how to use this code to serialize a javascript object:

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  o={};
	o.name = "Name";
	o.id = 1;
	j = json.stringify(o);

Also, to obtain the object back from JSON string, you can use following method:

x = json.parse(j);