Im making a notetaking app and Ive decided to store all the notes and structure in JSON file. On javascript, I get the JSON with AJAX, parse it and output it on the website.
My note structure is array of objects that can be nested, like this (if it is a note, it has a "content" attribute, if it is a folder, it has an array of objects (can be empty array too if the folder should me empty):
data {
entries = [
{
name: "Some note",
content: "This is a test note"
},
{
name: "folder",
children: [
{
name: "Bread recpie",
content: "Mix flour with water..."
},
{
name: "Soups",
children: [
{
name: "Pork soup",
content: "Add meat, onion..."
},
{
name: "Chicken soup"
content: "....."
}
]
}
]
}
]
}
To list the root directory, its simple, i just loop through the array as it only outputs the top-level records:
for (entry of data.entries) {
const li = document.createElement("li");
li.textContent = entry.name;
if (entry.children) {
li.className = "folder";
} else {
li.className = "file";
}
loop.appendChild(li);
}
But what about the folders? How should I proceed in listing the folders if the depth of nesting is unknown? And how do I target the specific folder? Should I add unique IDs to every object so i can filter the array with them? Or should I store some kind of depth information in a variable all the time?
You're making this more difficult for yourself by saving data to a JSON file. That is not a good approach. What you need to do is design a database schema appropriate for your data and create an API that outputs a predictable pattern of data that your client can work with.
I would suggest having a Folder resource and a Note resource linked through a one-to-many relationship. Each Folder resource can have many associated Note entries, but each Note has only one Folder that it is linked to. I suggest using an ORM, because most make it easy to eager load related data. For instance, if you choose Laravel you can use Eloquent, and then getting all notes for a folder is as easy as:
$folderWithNotes = Folder::with('notes')->where('name', 'school-notes')->get();
Knowing PHP is beside the point. You should still be able to see the logic of that.
If you create a database and build a server-side API to handle your data, you will end up with JSON on your client side that has a predictable format and is easy to work with.