javascript - How to convert JSON object structure to dot notation?

Question

I've got a variable I'm storing that will dictate what fields to exclude from a query:

excludeFields = {
  Contact: {
    Address: 0,
    Phone: 0
  }
}

I need to convert this to a dot notation that will work with Mongo's findOne, e.g.:

things.findOne({}, {fields: {'Contact.Address': 0, 'Contact.Phone': 0}})

Just passing excludeFields does not work and results in an error, "Projection values should be one of 1, 0, true, or false"

things.findOne({}, {fields: excludeFields})

Do I have to write my own function to convert from hierarchical structure to flat dot notation? Or is there some mechanism to do this in JavaScript that I'm not aware of?

Answer 1

This should be flexible enough for most needs:

function dotNotate(obj,target,prefix) {
  target = target || {},
  prefix = prefix || "";

  Object.keys(obj).forEach(function(key) {
    if ( typeof(obj[key]) === "object" && obj[key] !== null ) {
      dotNotate(obj[key],target,prefix + key + ".");
    } else {
      return target[prefix + key] = obj[key];
    }
  });

  return target;
}

Run on your excludesFields variable like so:

dotNotate(excludeFields);

It returns the current structure:

{ "Contact.Address" : 0, "Contact.Phone" : 0 }

So you can even do, inline:

things.findOne({}, {fields: dotNotate(excludeFields) })

Or provide as a projection:

var projection = { "fields": {} };
dotNotate(excludeFields,projection.fields);
things.findOne({}, projection);

Works nicely at all depths and even with arrays in an essential way, unless you need operators like $push.