Archives
-
A quick helper to work on JSON streams
Newtonsoft’s JSON library provides lots of different ways to read JSON documents, including a SAX-like way to work with the document by reading it forward-only: JsonTextReader. This is very advantageous if you’re working with very large documents, especially if they are being streamed from a remote source. Using this kind of API, there is no need to have the whole document loaded in memory at once. The downside is that those API are usually quite unfriendly and low-level: you usually have to move a cursor and read values manually. This is not just tedious, it’s also brittle and typically creates excessive coupling with the structure of the JSON document. Last week, I had to read a large JSON document, and I wanted to explore better ways to perform such tasks, which led me to write a small set of helper methods that make it a lot easier to walk JSON documents using Newtonsoft’s JsonTextReader.
-
Many ways to relate Orchard things, part 6: enumerations
Enumeration fields are not exactly relationships, but they implement a very similar scenario. Therefore, it's useful to know about them, so that you can use them when they are relevant.
Enumeration fields are fields that present a set of predefined values, of which one or several can be selected, depending on the field configuration. The values are defined per field, which means that those values can’t be re-used across different content parts. If you have a scenario for re-use of values, then you probably need to use a taxonomy instead.