Assigning external JSON to a var

Question

I am populating a Dojo Combobox dropdown with values from JSON. The code below works just fine (inline JSON).....

<script>
var magicvars = {
   identifier: 'name',
   label: 'name',
   items: [
   {name: "ZCCN_NO_1", label: "<img width='16px' height='16px' src='http://localhost:3000/static/images/eight_ball_16x16.png'/>ACCN_NO_1"},
   {name: "CR_Local_ID", label:"<img width='16px' height='16px' src='http://localhost:3000/static/images/eight_ball_16x16.png'/>CR_Local_ID"}
]};
</script>

<div dojoType="dojo.data.ItemFileReadStore" data="magicvars" jsId="xvarStore2"></div>

However when I specify an external file for the JSON, no go, which is to say that the dropdown populates. The external file is standard.txt and looks like this...

{
  identifier: 'name',
  label: 'name',
  items: [
  {name: "ZCCN_NO_1", label: "<img width='16px' height='16px' src='http://localhost:3000/static/images/eight_ball_16x16.png'/>ACCN_NO_1"},
  {name: "CR_Local_ID", label:"<img width='16px' height='16px' src='http://localhost:3000/static/images/eight_ball_16x16.png'/>CR_Local_ID"}
 ]};

My HTML call to dojo the looks like this..

<div dojoType="dojo.data.ItemFileReadStore" jsId="xvarStore2" url="http://localhost:3000/static/standard.txt">
</div>

Inline works fine but the external call does not. Apologies if this is a remedial question but how can I read the external file and assign it to "magicvars". I just don't want to clutter up the HTML with a bunch of inline JSON.

Any advice is appreciated. Janie

Answer 1

It's not valid JSON, so will not parse with most JSON.parse implementations. Try quoting the key names and getting rid of the trailing semicolon.

On Chrome,

JSON.parse('{ a: "b" }')

produces

SyntaxError: Unexpected token ILLEGAL

as does

JSON.parse('{ a: "b" };')

but with valid JSON (note the quotes around "a")

JSON.parse('{ "a": "b" }')

returns the expected result.

Answer 2

Try renaming your file to standard.json.

My guess is that dojo is reading your file as a plain text string, and therefor not parsing the JSON. (Which, as pointed out in other answers, is not valid)