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How To View JSON in a Pretty Way

Updated: at 02:12 PM

Cutting to the chase, I choose Vladimir Bodurov’s Color Formatter!

For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a project that uses Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC for providing data to our pure JavaScript application.  That is, there are no web forms, no dynamic HTML generation, just 100% JavaScript running on the client.  I’m using a library called ExtJS which gives us high quality “forms like” user interactions and MVC for getting the data.  That is, the Application looks like this:

image

The data retrieval URL used by the JavaScript look like:

http://www.mycompany.com/data/Company/Get

And, the JSON that comes back using either FireBug or Fiddler looks like this:

image

Problem is that it’s hard to read the JSON data.  Firebug does a reasonable job of formatting, but it’s still not perfect.  Up until now, the way I always have formatted the data is to type into bing or Google “format json” and the first reasonable choice has been http://jsonformat.com/.  Cutting and pasting my data into it shows:

image

However, my new favorite JSON Formatter  makes the data look like this:

( http://www.bodurov.com/JsonFormatter/ )

(more information at: http://blog.bodurov.com/Formatter-and-colorer-of-raw-JSON-code)

And, it’s available as simple html you can run on your own server here at codeplex:

http://www.codeplex.com/QuickJsonFormatter/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=10136

 

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IMHO, much cleaner, shows me the data both before and after, as well as colorizes it which always makes me happy.

Check out the ORM (Object Relational Mapper) PRISMA. The database access method I use in all my projects