multiple attached nodes

[Paul Harris]

Hi again,

It seems logical and possible to attach our nodes multiple times in the tree, like so:

      json_t * host = json_object();

      json_t * child = json_string("hello");

      json_object_set(host, "child1", child);

      json_object_set(host, "child2", child);

which yields:  {"child1": "hello", "child2": "hello"}

Perhaps this can be mentioned in the reference count or cycles part of the documentation?

It has importance when deciding how to manage the tree, for example,

I wanted to track the parent of a node.

At the moment, I am tracking the parents explicitly in my little wrapper, but I thought it would be cool if I could call something like

json_t * json_node_parent( json_t * );

which returns null (if no parent), or the object/array parent of the node.

The purpose is so that I can calculate the address of a node for error reporting,

eg if I expect node C to be a string of "ABC", and the JSON looks like this:

{ "A" : [ {}, {}, { "B" : { "C" : "ABC" } } ] }

then I'd like to print out

Expected A[2].B.C to equal "ABC"

I can do this either 2 ways:

1) Do a recursive search of the entire JSON tree and find the node and its parent chain,

2) Trace up through parent pointers.

If you can attach a node more than once to the tree, then option #1 is not viable, nor is a json_node_parent() function.

So, I shall continue with my wrapper, which will check to ensure the wrapper isn't attached more than once (even if the underlying node is).

thanks,
Paul