How to store data in JSON file in Node-RED

General
6

As always :wink:

Yes, given the data shown, this might be correct. Of course, the advantage of using JSON is that you can simply adjust to need. So that you could easily just have another global variable that tracks that info too. Or group the existing JSON by type and then you can just count the number of entries.

Personally, I tend to use a slightly different structure for my in-memory variables like this:

{
    "Light 1": {
        "device":"Light 1",
        "zone":"bedroom1",
        "name":"Wall Light"
        "fitting":"wall",
        "colour":"warmwhite"
    },
    "Light 2": {
        "device":"Light 2", 
        "zone":"bedroom1",
        "name":"Ceiling Light",
        "fitting":"ceiling",
        "colour":"RGB"
    }
}

So creating as an object. This makes it easier to relate the data to other objects - I then tend to convert to an array if I need to. Of course, for some processing, the array format is better.

Indeed, I'm currently writing a heating dashboard using uibuilder with VueJS and bootstrap-vue. Bootstrap-vue has a nice table component but it needs its data as an array. As the data is only updated once per minute, I simply convert it before sending. Merging together several variables is much easier as an object.