Re: JSON Formatting opinion

From: Don Brown via WEB400 <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: web400 (web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) <web400@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Don Brown <DBrown@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 11/11/2019 11:58 PM
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [WEB400] JSON Formatting opinion
Sent by: "WEB400" <web400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Hi Group,

We are working with a third party to process transactions and receive

data in JSON.

Recently we received an error using DATA-INTO. Strange thing was it
worked on one system but not on another so we have scheduled to get the
two systems on the same PTF levels.

Anyway the JSON data looks like this;

If account details are provided we get something like this ...

"account": {
"id": 36682,
"name": "HEALTH",
"ref": "45010",
"active": "1",
"type": "INVOICE",
"pin": "",
"prepaid": 0
},

If no account details are present we get ...

"account": [],


We would have expected it to look like:

"account": {},

The third part replied with the following;

We have some stuff like this, things return an object, but if there its

object its an empty array. When using this in PHP its fine but other
languages it will cause problems. We can queue it up for a fix. Maybe

it as account: null instead of account: {}

Just wondering on an opinion if you think the null account being

as an array is valid or not or how you would address this.

We are using YAJLINTO as the parser.

Don Brown