Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

iOS

TJ Rogers
TJ Rogers
8,758 Points
Posted by TJ Rogers
TJ Rogers
8,758 Points

Figuring Out JSON

Recently finished the Blog Reader tutorial. Great stuff btw. It somewhat resembles an app that I'm hoping to build, but I can't seem to wrap my head around how to use my own data in this project. I'm thinking this is something I'll need JSON for, but i've referenced some of the other JSON posts on the forum, but still don't have a clear way forward.

I have an excel file with over a thousand rows (and will prob reach appx 10,000), and six headers, which I would like to turn into an app which will enable a user to navigate this data more easily wih a series of tables that will segue to other tables, which will ultimately narrow to a single view containing the desired information. After completing the blog reader project, my thought was to convert this file to a csv, and then convert to a JSON file. I see there are some resources online that permit this.

Is this correct? Am I understanding JSON correctly in that it is nothing more than how the data is produced with a particular arrangement of punctuation and syntax? In other words, could I just copy and paste the data from one of these JSON generators to some HTML and upload it to an otherwise blank web page? And then grab the data from the web page? Or am I missing something?

Please let me know if I'm way off base here. Ultimately I need is a way to access this massive amount of Excel data as an NSArray and NSDictionary in the manner in which the blog reader app did with it's data. If there is a better way to do this, please point me in the direction of another tutorial, or some other form of guidance.

Thanks!

2 Answers

Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points
Stone Preston
Stone Preston
42,016 Points

Well, its not exactly the answer you are looking for, but Parse is pretty easy to use as a beginner and the ribbit app project is a great way to learn how to use it with your app. I am having fun with it and learning lots. You can upload your own csv or xls file to parse.com as shown here. Parse stores its data as JSON as well, you just dont have to do everything yourself and you dont have to know how to actually use JSON, you just use the parse framework

TJ Rogers
TJ Rogers
8,758 Points
TJ Rogers
TJ Rogers
8,758 Points

Thanks for the reply. I recently started the Ribbit project and had just singed up for Parse. Didn't realize they offer this service. Sounds like this is the solution I'm looking for. Guess I'll continue plugging away.

Thanks again!