1603986 - Support newline delimited JSON (NDJSON) with MIME type application/x-ndjson

Status: NEW

(DevTools :: JSON Viewer, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

https://github.com/ndjson/ndjson-spec covers a pretty common convention of having a file that consists of newline-delimited JSON as indicated by MIME type application/x-ndjson. For example, this is the file format for Searchfox's analysis files. (This is also why I'm making the enhancement request... I'm changing Searchfox to expose these files and it would be cool to be able to use the JSON viewer UI.)

The general idea would be to treat the NDJSON formatted:

{ "line" : 1 }
{ "line" : 2 }
{ "line" : 3 }

like it was:

[{ "line" : 1 },
{ "line" : 2 },
{ "line" : 3 }]

Comment 1

[Jan Honza Odvarko [:Honza] (always need-info? me)]

Thanks for the report!

Agree, it makes sense to support application/x-ndjson

Honza

Comment 2

[Jan Honza Odvarko [:Honza] (always need-info? me)]

Some pointers to the source code for anyone interested in fixing this bug:

1. Here is the place where JSONViewer is checking supported mime type
   https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/6bceafe72cad5d5752667b4b6bd595d3a4047ca3/devtools/client/jsonview/converter-observer.js#72-97

2. Here is where we create text node in the page with JSON data
   https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/6bceafe72cad5d5752667b4b6bd595d3a4047ca3/devtools/client/jsonview/converter-child.js#321

3. As data are coming from the server we are appending them into the text node
   https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/6bceafe72cad5d5752667b4b6bd595d3a4047ca3/devtools/client/jsonview/converter-child.js#168

4. Received JSON data are parsed (using standard parseJSON) here
   https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/6bceafe72cad5d5752667b4b6bd595d3a4047ca3/devtools/client/jsonview/json-viewer.js#146-170

So, the conversion could be done along these lines.

Honza

Comment 3

[Oriol Brufau [:Oriol]]

But NDJSON is not JSON, it's a superset, so it needs a custom parser.
I don't think writing a custom parser is a good first bug.

Comment 4

[Jan Honza Odvarko [:Honza] (always need-info? me)]

I was hoping there is already an existing parser module we could reuse...
Removing the keyword.

Honza

Comment 5

[:Harald Kirschner :digitarald]

Might it be useful to have more generic source formatting mechanisms, as we keep adding more for WebSocket frame inspection, Storage value inspection, etc.

This would be the library to include: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ndjson