Editing JSON data

Tweaking those under-the-hood extra fields for membership and groups

James Scholes avatar
Written by James Scholes
Updated over a week ago

Some more advanced information in Sheep may be stored as JSON format (JavaScript Object Notation), such as information captured through an external form or app. Occasionally it may be necessary to edit this information using the JSON editor.

Please proceed with caution: directly editing JSON information in this manner may have unintended results in external apps.

This editor both looks and functions slightly differently to the standard field editor.

Sheep will only allow you to save valid JSON - as you edit you will be notified of any formatting errors in your data, which should enable you to fix them before saving. If in doubt, the Reset contents button will load the current information back in.

Tips

Generally when formatting JSON each entry should start with a key, usually between either single or double quotes.
A value can be:

  • a number, e.g. 1  or 3.14159265358979 

  • a string of text (between quotes), e.g. 'the quick brown fox'  or "We're off to see the wizard" 

  • a list of values between square brackets), e.g. ['beans', 'spam', 'egg', 'bacon', 'toast', 12] 

  • a dictionary of keys and values (between curly brackets), e.g. {'key1': 1, 'key2': 'value 2'} 

Each entry in a dictionary (including the main dictionary) must be separated from the next by a comma.

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