Access shortcuts

Children shortcuts

As covered in How to access children, cJobect children are roughly equivalent to JavaScript objects’ children. However the syntax of VBA means that we have to be a little more verbose than JavaScript. To help a bit, here are some shortcuts for accessing property values.

This will return the value of the selected property

job.child("somekey").value

or, as we learned in How to access children, by childIndex

job.children(1).value

Similarly, this will convert it to to a string

job.child("somekey").toString

or by childIndex

job.children(1).toString

This is roughly equivalent to simply job.somekey or job[0]  and job.somekey.toString() or job[0].toString()

However you can pass the name of the child as an argument to toString() or to value() ( actually in the case of value() we have to use cValue() when passing a child name  (.. it’s a long story but it’s to do with limitations in VBA classes), so we can rewrite the .child() examples above as 

This will return the value of the selected property

job.cValue("somekey")

and

job.toString("somekey")

Grandchildren

these methods take the same arguments as .child() , so these examples all work

job.child("achild").child("agrandchild").cValue("agreatgrandchild")

is equivalent to

job.cValue("achild.agrandchild.agreatgrandchild")

which is close to the JavaScript

job.achild.agrandchild.agreatgrandchild

You can also mix index and named keys, so

job.children(1).toString("name")

is equivalent to

job.toString("1.name")

and the JavaScript equivalent

job[0].name.toString()

Now let’s look at some more cJobject topics.

Storing objects as values

Storing other objects in cJobject   If cJobject was just about getting stuff in and out of JSON, then we'd stop here, but you'll find that I use it in pretty much all the VBA examples on this site. This gives me the ability to deal with  structured data in ...

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Navigation

Iteration   As per the examples in cJobject deep dive the most common navigation of the cJobject is by iteration through the children, or by direct access as covered in How to access children. However there are a few other navigation shortcuts, most of which don't  have JavaScript equivalents. For these tests, we'll ...

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How to access children

Children   As mentioned in the introduction, each cJobject is either a key/value pair or is the parent of some more cJobjects. Accessing the children of a cJobject is straightforward, and as close to the JavaScript as possible within the confines and rules of the VBA language syntax. By key , ...

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cJobject deep dive

You'll probably now be familiar with cJobject and want to do some fancier things. Here are some examples. You can download a vanilla cJobject workbook from the data access section of the downloads page, or construct your own with the tools in Integrate VBA with Github and this repository. Recap A cJobject tries to emulate what ...

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For more on this see How to use cJobject