Some days ago I introduced the possibility to serialize a QObject instance to JSON. Today I’m going to show you the opposite operation: initializing a QObject using a JSON object.

I refactored a bit my latest changes: I created a new class called QObjectHelper that provides the methods required to convert a QObject instance to a QVariantMap and vice-versa.

This class can be used in conjunction with the Serializer and Parser classes to serialize and deserialize QObject instances to and from JSON.

Let me show a quick example, suppose the declaration of Person class looks like this:

{% codeblock [class definition] [lang:cpp ] %} class Person : public QObject { Q_OBJECT Q_PROPERTY(QString name READ name WRITE setName) Q_PROPERTY(int phoneNumber READ phoneNumber WRITE setPhoneNumber) Q_PROPERTY(Gender gender READ gender WRITE setGender) Q_PROPERTY(QDate dob READ dob WRITE setDob) Q_ENUMS(Gender)

public: Person(QObject* parent = 0); ~Person(); QString name() const; void setName(const QString& name); int phoneNumber() const; void setPhoneNumber(const int phoneNumber); enum Gender {Male, Female}; void setGender(Gender gender); Gender gender() const; QDate dob() const; void setDob(const QDate& dob); private: QString m_name; int m_phoneNumber; Gender m_gender; QDate m_dob; }; {% endcodeblock %}

From QObject to JSON

The following code will serialize an instance of Person to JSON :

{% codeblock [From QObject to JSON] [lang:cpp ] %} Person person; person.setName(“Flavio”); person.setPhoneNumber(123456); person.setGender(Person::Male); person.setDob(QDate(1982, 7, 12)); QVariantMap variant = QObjectHelper::qobject2qvariant(&person;); Serializer serializer; qDebug() << serializer.serialize( variant); {% endcodeblock %}

The generated output will be:

{% codeblock [JSON data] [lang:json ] %} { “dob” : “1982-07-12”, “gender” : 0, “name” : “Flavio”, “phoneNumber” : 123456 } {% endcodeblock %}

From JSON to QObject

Suppose you have the following JSON data stored into a QString:

{% codeblock [JSON data] [lang:json ] %} { “dob” : “1982-07-12”, “gender” : 0, “name” : “Flavio”, “phoneNumber” : 123456 } {% endcodeblock %}

The following code will initialize an already allocated instance of Person using the JSON values:

{% codeblock [From JSON to QObject] [lang:cpp ] %} Parser parser; QVariant variant = parser.parse(json);
Person person; QObjectHelper::qvariant2qobject(variant.toMap(), &person;); {% endcodeblock %}

A new release

These changes have been included inside the new release of QJson: 0.7.0.

Packages for openSUSE are building right now.