Introduction: JSON Components

The ShapeDiver JSON components make it easy to send and receive information from your model to a web application, in a format that web developers already know and use every day.

What is JSON?

JSON is an open-standard data format that is widely used for building web applications. JSON is a text format, which makes it lightweight and convenient to send data to and from a server. But JSON is written with Javascript notation, which means that once it is parsed into Javascript code, the data contained in the object can be accessed and used conveniently.

Since JSON is a text format, it can be sent to a Grasshopper definition using the ShapeDiverTextInput or the ShapeDiverTextFileImport components. The ShapeDiver JSON components help with parsing the text input and convert it to a structured JSON object that can be used as conveniently as a Javascript object in a web application.

Learn more
A complete description of the JSON file format is out of the scope of this documentation, but you can find a more complete introduction on W3Schools.

Why read JSON objects in Grasshopper?

This is a simple JSON object:

{name: "John", age: 31, city: "New York"}

If you receive it through the ShapeDiverTextInput component, it will be read as a Text object in Grasshopper. Let's say you want to find out what age John is. You'll have to analyze the text, find where the chain of characters "age" is located and read the number that comes after it. It's doable, but very difficult using only native Grasshopper components, and a bit of work using a C# or Python script.

With the ShapeDiver JSON components, you can extract the information directly, and using the same syntax as you would in Javascript. This is what it would look like in this case:

Find out more about how to use our JSON components in the next articles:

1. ShapeDiverJSONParse

2. ShapeDiverJSONAccess

3. ShapeDiverJSONConvert

4. ShapeDiverJSONConstruct