Symphony.

Anyone have a decent trick for importing generic JSON output? I’m currently considering using a JSON-to-XML script and importing with XML Importer, but maybe someone is already doing this?

I haven’t tried it but somebody wrote a Dynamic JSON datasource extension. Or do you want to import it into one of your Sections?

I’d suggest using the JSON Datasource extension that phoque mentioned, create a page using the datasource and do a copy-of in your XSLT to get all the XML from the datasource visible, then use the XML Importer extension to import it into sections…

A little bit of a long route, but I do similar for some of my data…

Hey, that’s pretty clever! I do want the data in a Section, but I think it might be cleaner to use a local standalone PHP converter script and then just call that URL with the XML Importer. (I will have to do this for more than one JSON feed, so the datasource+page approach might get somewhat tedious.)

You could just include the Json_to_xml class from my extension in your script.

$xml = Json_to_xml::convert($json);

I’ve found that @brentburgoyne’s Json_to_xml class works quite well. The only change I made was to throw an exception instead of returning error.

I also added in an option to get the data back as XML, or as an XML Document (the difference being one returns XML fragment omitting the XML declaration.

@brendo I am glad you have found it useful. I had also planned on having it throw an exception instead of returning an error. The other idea I had was to have an option for it to return the DOMDocument object itself, but I also see how it could be useful to return a fragment. I made a quick change to the class that will allow for all three.

Json_to_xml::convert($json) // returns XML with the declaration (same as before)

Json_to_xml::convert($json, 'fragment') // returns XML without the declaration

Json_to_xml::convert($json, 'object') // returns DOMDocument object

I gave this class a go, but it died on me while attempting to create the XML output. Not sure yet if this was a problem with the JSON source (maybe it had invalid characters or something.) Will followup here once I’ve got it sorted.

I did some more research on this, and one other approach is to use the PEAR XML Serializer as described here. I’m going to try this solution as well.