[permalink]2019-01-18 08:53
jsondoc12
[permalink]
I don't really know where my open-source/freeware projects get used by other people (and I don't really care all that much, really), but ofcouse where I use my private libraries in the projects of my day job, I've got a first-row seat to see how they perform. No, even better, I'm the stagehand. I know it's important to keep the two separated though. At work I can only use and call libraries, never work on them. I can make changes, but I would have to do so like anybody else: clone a local repository, store the changes there, and when they're ready have the good manners of sending out a pull request. If 'at-home’-‘hobbyist-programmer’-me decides to merge it, it makes my employer a co-creator of the project, creating a new legal situation that my employer would need to know about.
What I can also do, ofcourse, is let private-me know that ‘at-work’-me would really like this or that extra feature or interface, and then when I can put some evening time into programming, I can see if I get round to it. Github issues are nice for that. Or Post-It's on my car key...
But recently I've got a real decent suggestion from a collegue. It didn't come in over a pull request, but it made sense, so why not put it in at the base:
https://github.com/stijnsanders/jsonDoc/commit/fb01e0865fa888c7441234726dc4a90b0c802582
The IJSONDocument interface has Parse to load data from a string holding JSON data, and a function ToString to convert the contents back to a string. For jsonDoc (and bsonDoc before that) I want concise syntax, so I though I'd make Parse a function that returns Self so you can chain calls. But my collegue wondered why IJSONDocument doesn't have a property AsString:WideString;. In theory it would have read ToString write Parse, except Parse needs to be a procedure, not a function. So I had a close look and changed it around. Another option would be to add an extra procedure SetString, but that would mean the virtual method pointer table for the IJSONDocument interface would have an extra item, to a method with exactly the same behaviour, which makes little sense.
So I changed it around. If you really like/need chaining, there's still the function JSON overload that takes a Variant. If you pass it a string, it'll call plain function JSON to get a new instance, and call Parse for you on the string.
