Month: April 2018

Tales from support: Spaces for indentation

During the development of JSONBuddy 4.5 we got a customer inquiry about the need to use spaces instead of tabs for indentation levels in the JSON editor. So we added this setting to the “Editor” page of the “Options” dialog:

Option to use tab or space for indentation
Option to use tab or space for indentation

If you remove the check from the “Use tabs for indentation” check-box, the editor will insert spaces to set the indentation level for every new line. This setting is also used for JSON pretty-print and the various conversion operations of JSONBuddy.

Please keep in mind that this doesn’t replace any tabs which are already inserted. Any existing JSON data with either spaces or tabs as indentation will keep the characters currently used. In addition, the indentation functionality copies the white-space characters from any previous line. So don’t be confused if any new line has still tab characters inserted because the previous line uses tabs as indentation. Any new document in the JSON editor will use the setting from above right from the start.

All your JSON schema are belong to us

Ok, please don’t take this title literally. But did you know that you can instantly load all JSON schema files from schemastore.org in JSONBuddy? All you need to do is to open JSONBuddy and to use the “File | Open from JSON schema library…” command to show the open dialog which reads all available schema documents from schemastore.org. This list is updated any time you start the JSONBuddy editor.

Open JSON schema from library dialog
Open JSON schema from library dialog

schemastore.org is a great resource to learn how others are writing JSON schemas and can help a lot on providing own specifications for your JSON data. After the schema is loaded in JSONBuddy, the editor will automatically generate JSON sample data. You can immediately create a new document from the sample data using the “JSON | Generate sample document from JSON schema” command.

In addition, the unique built-in JSON schema analyzer will start to report any issues it can find about the schema. You can learn more about the analyzer on the following page: An assistant on creating JSON schema documents.

As you can see, JSONBuddy is a complete package to make working with JSON data and JSON schema a lot easier, quicker and more comfortable.