Altova XMLSpy and MapForce JSON tools have long supported JSON and JSON5 for editing as well as data mapping and conversion. As new JSON formats arise in response to real-world usage, the support in these tools is expanding.
This article will help explain the advantages of two newer formats – JSON Comments and JSON Lines – and show how to use them in XMLSpy and MapForce.
The JSON data format continues to evolve as an open standard as it is creatively applied to new data interchange requirements. JSON Lines, defined at http://jsonlines.org/, is a convenient text format for storing structured data where each record is a single line and a valid JSON object. JSON Lines handles tabular data and clearly identifies data types without ambiguity. This allows records to be processed one at a time, which makes the format very useful for exporting and sending data.
Altova MapForce supports data mapping JSON Lines as either a data source or target. Let’s look at a mapping project to extract records from a database table and map to a JSON Lines file for output.
