Allow more control over sorting

[mikemanger]

In our project we want to sort everything in a json file, apart from any fields sub-keys where having them in a set order makes sense contextually, even if it just to make it easier for the programmer to look at the file.

I'm not sure what the best way of specifying this would be but having sortKeys accept a depth parameter might be a simply way of giving a bit more control.

[prantlf]

Wouldn't a depth parameter rather give up the control from some level on? I think that I don't understand it. Would you have an example of such structure?

[mikemanger]

Hi, thanks for the response (and the recent release 👍).

Sorry I didn't explain very well, here is an example used to generate a form:

{
	"someid": {
		"name": "abc",
		"fields": {
			"name": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 0
			},
			"email": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 1
			}
		}
	},
	"anotherid": {
		"name": "something",
		"fields": {
			"button-text-1": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 0
			},
			"button-url-1": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 1
			},
			"button-text-2": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 2
			},
			"button-url-2": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 3
			}
		}
	}
}

With sortKeys set to true this would become:

{
	"anotherid": {
		"fields": {
			"button-text-1": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 0
			},
			"button-text-2": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 2
			},
			"button-url-1": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 1
			},
			"button-url-2": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 3
			}
		},
		"name": "something"
	},
	"someid": {
		"fields": {
			"email": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 1
			},
			"name": {
				"meta": "here",
				"order": 0
			}
		},
		"name": "abc"
	}
}

The JSON is still valid/works but it is harder for a human to parse because the order key is ignored.

I was suggesting being able to pass an int (e.g. sortKeys: 1 or sortKeyDepth: 1) to only order the top level of the json file which is important if there are a lot of form objects in the file.. but I'm sure there are better ways to do this.