Feature Request - Sorting JSON Objects by Attribute

[tiymat]

Describe the problem:
It would be really cool to be able to sort an array of JSON objects based on a given attribute.

Possible ways to implement:
Possibly msort could have a flag indicating which attribute to sort on? Or, even better, the flag could accept multiple arguments (comma-separated?) So first the objects are sorted on the first attribute, and then all of the objects with the same value for that attribute are sorted on the second attribute, etc.

Additional context:
msort's current behavior seems to be to sort using the attributes in alphabetical order, unless I'm misunderstanding it.

misc » cat employees.json
[{"Name":"Jake","Department":"Sales"},{"Name":"Carl","Department":"Accounting"},{"Name":"Abigail","Department":"IT"}]
misc » cat employees.json -> :json: msort -> foreach { -> cat }
{"Department":"Accounting","Name":"Carl"}
{"Department":"IT","Name":"Abigail"}
{"Department":"Sales","Name":"Jake"}

My request is to be able to sort on a specific attribute like Name, e.g.

cat employees.json -> :json: msort --attribute Name -> foreach { -> cat }
{"Department":"IT","Name":"Abigail"}
{"Department":"Accounting","Name":"Carl"}
{"Department":"Sales","Name":"Jake"}

Documentation:
Please rate your success with referring to the docs @ https://murex.rocks

• I haven't read the docs / the solution should be more discoverable
• I have read the docs but the content wasn't clear
• I have read the docs but this query was missing
• I have read the docs and this query was answered but I'm still having problems

Maybe there's already a way of doing it, but if so I wasn't able to find it in the documentation.

[tiymat]

Right after I submitted that issue I had an idea for a workaround doing basically this

misc » cat employees.json -> :json: foreach --jmap employee { $employee -> ["Name"] } { $employee }
{
    "Abigail": "{\"Department\":\"IT\",\"Name\":\"Abigail\"}",
    "Carl": "{\"Department\":\"Accounting\",\"Name\":\"Carl\"}",
    "Jake": "{\"Department\":\"Sales\",\"Name\":\"Jake\"}"
}

But
A) It seems really hacky,
B) It only works when the values of the attribute you want to sort on are unique, and
C) You'd still have to iterate over the keys of the resulting map object, which I can't remember if there's a way of doing -- I'll have to check later.

[lmorg]

Good suggestion. The problem here would that JSON maps are unordered (as per the JSON specification) so the output cannot be json type otherwise the next tool you use will just scramble the ordering again.

That said, I don’t think your request is an unreasonable one. It might just need a little bit of magic to get working right.

[lmorg]

@tiymat I think the best approach here, since we are talking about relational data, is probably to convert the object to a table. eg

» open ~/employees.json
[{"Name":"Jake","Department":"Sales"},{"Name":"Carl","Department":"Accounting"},{"Name":"Abigail","Department":"IT"}]

reformat as a CSV:

» open ~/employees.json -> format csv
Department,Name
Sales,Jake
Accounting,Carl
IT,Abigail

run SQL against table:

» open ~/employees.json -> format csv -> select Name, Department order by Name
Name,Department
Abigail,IT
Carl,Accounting
Jake,Sales

a formatting from a map to a table fix is in the commit above (7d86cc2) and, currently, you cannot convert from a table back to a map

[tiymat]

Makes sense, haven't tested it yet but I think that would work for the use case I envisioned that caused me to make this feature request.

I actually had no idea about the select builtin, that'll come in handy!

[lmorg]

I believe this should have been closed a while ago but I missed it?