Business
Jobs
  • About Us
  • Solutions
    • Job Postings
      Post your job and receive qualified candidates in 48h.
    • Candidate Assessments
      500+ technical and psychological tests, plus anti-fraud.
    • Headhunting
      Tailor-made executive search from start to finish.
    • Payroll + EOR
      Payroll dispersal and EOR across 15+ LATAM countries.
  • Pricing
  • Jobs

0

124
Views
how to move elements in nested array of objects in javascript

I saw these two questions:

  1. Javascript move objects in a nested array
  2. How to move element in nested array

But they do not work for me.

So I have a nested dynamic array like this:

const data = [
  {
    id: 1,
    subData: [
      {
        id: 2,
        subData: []
      },
      {
        id: 3,
        subData: [
          {
            id: 4,
            subData: []
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    id: 5,
    subData: []
  },
  .
  .
  .
]

I have to move the nested elements with their "id". For example, how can I write a function that gives me the following result:

const data = [
  {
    id: 1,
    subData: [
      {
        id: 2,
        subData: []
      },
      {
        id: 3,
        subData: [] // object with id 4 was here
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    id: 5,
    subData: []
  },
  {
    id: 4, // now its here
    subData: []
  }
  .
  .
  .
]

What I've tried so far is to write the following function to first find an element with a specific "id" and then move that object:

const findObjById = (obj, key, value) => {
  if (obj[key] === value) {
    return obj;
  }

  const keys = Object.keys(obj);
  for (let i = 0; i < keys.length; i++) {
    const k = keys[i];

    if (obj[k] && typeof obj[k] === 'object') {
      const found = findObjById(obj[k], key, value);

      if (found) {
        return found;
      }
    }
  }
}

Works to find a specific object. But I could not move the found object

about 4 years ago · Juan Pablo Isaza
1 answers
Answer question

0

Here is an example using a generic traverse function which accepts a visitor callback which is run on each iteration of the traversal and based on the return value of the visitor either returns or continues. (see this answer for more discussion).

We can then create a splice_source traversal which accepts an object to traverse and a predicate to match by and returns the matched element after splicing it from its parent array, and a find_target_array which will return the subData array from an object that matches the passed predicate.

It only remains to push the retrieved source object to the retrieved target array.

This is just an example and will need error checking and streamlining for your particular use cases, but it illustrates some flexible techniques which may be useful moving forward.

const data = [{ id: 1, subData: [{ id: 2, subData: [], }, { id: 3, subData: [{ id: 4, subData: [], },], },], }, { id: 5, subData: [], },];

// generic 'traverse' which accepts a 'visitor' callback
function traverse(o, fn) {
  for (const k in o) {
    const res = fn.apply(this, [o, k]);
    if (res) {
      return res;
    }
    if (o[k] !== null && typeof o[k] == 'object') {
      const res = traverse(o[k], fn);
      if (res) return res;
    }
  }
}

// create custom 'visitors' to retrieve source and target arrays
const splice_source = (obj, predicate) =>
  traverse(
    obj,
    // 'visitor' callback
    (o, k) => {
      let m_index = -1;
      if (Array.isArray(o[k])) {
        m_index = o[k].findIndex((o) => predicate(o, k));
      }

      return m_index !== -1 ? o[k].splice(m_index, 1)[0] : false;
    });

const find_target_array = (obj, predicate) => 
  traverse(
    obj,
    // 'visitor' callback
    (o, k) => (predicate(o, k) ? o.subData : false)
  );

// move {id: 4} to subData array of {id: 5}
const source_object = splice_source(data, (obj) => obj?.id === 4);
const target_array = find_target_array(data, (obj) => obj?.id === 5);

target_array.push(source_object);
console.log(JSON.stringify(data, null, 2));

// move {id: 3} to top level 'data' array
data.push(splice_source(data, (obj) => obj?.id === 3));
console.log(JSON.stringify(data, null, 2));
.as-console-wrapper { max-height: 100% !important; top: 0; }

about 4 years ago · Juan Pablo Isaza Report
Answer question
Find remote jobs

Discover the new way to find a job!

Top jobs
Top job categories
Business
Post vacancy Pricing Sales
Legal
Terms and conditions Privacy policy
© 2026 PeakU Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Andres GPT
Show me some job opportunities
There's an error!