Parsing JSON in Excel VBA

Question

I have the same issue as in Excel VBA: Parsed JSON Object Loop but cannot find any solution. My JSON has nested objects so suggested solution like VBJSON and vba-json do not work for me. I also fixed one of them to work properly but the result was a call stack overflow because of to many recursion of the doProcess function.

The best solution appears to be the jsonDecode function seen in the original post. It is very fast and highly effective; my object structure is all there in a generic VBA Object of type JScriptTypeInfo.

The issue at this point is that I cannot determine what will be the structure of the objects, therefore, I do not know beforehand the keys that will reside in each generic objects. I need to loop through the generic VBA Object to acquire the keys/properties.

If my parsing javascript function could trigger a VBA function or sub, that would be excellent.

Answer 1

If you want to build on top of ScriptControl, you can add a few helper method to get at the required information. The JScriptTypeInfo object is a bit unfortunate: it contains all the relevant information (as you can see in the Watch window) but it seems impossible to get at it with VBA. However, the Javascript engine can help us:

Option Explicit

Private ScriptEngine As ScriptControl

Public Sub InitScriptEngine()
    Set ScriptEngine = New ScriptControl
    ScriptEngine.Language = "JScript"
    ScriptEngine.AddCode "function getProperty(jsonObj, propertyName) { return jsonObj[propertyName]; } "
    ScriptEngine.AddCode "function getKeys(jsonObj) { var keys = new Array(); for (var i in jsonObj) { keys.push(i); } return keys; } "
End Sub

Public Function DecodeJsonString(ByVal JsonString As String)
    Set DecodeJsonString = ScriptEngine.Eval("(" + JsonString + ")")
End Function

Public Function GetProperty(ByVal JsonObject As Object, ByVal propertyName As String) As Variant
    GetProperty = ScriptEngine.Run("getProperty", JsonObject, propertyName)
End Function

Public Function GetObjectProperty(ByVal JsonObject As Object, ByVal propertyName As String) As Object
    Set GetObjectProperty = ScriptEngine.Run("getProperty", JsonObject, propertyName)
End Function

Public Function GetKeys(ByVal JsonObject As Object) As String()
    Dim Length As Integer
    Dim KeysArray() As String
    Dim KeysObject As Object
    Dim Index As Integer
    Dim Key As Variant

    Set KeysObject = ScriptEngine.Run("getKeys", JsonObject)
    Length = GetProperty(KeysObject, "length")
    ReDim KeysArray(Length - 1)
    Index = 0
    For Each Key In KeysObject
        KeysArray(Index) = Key
        Index = Index + 1
    Next
    GetKeys = KeysArray
End Function


Public Sub TestJsonAccess()
    Dim JsonString As String
    Dim JsonObject As Object
    Dim Keys() As String
    Dim Value As Variant
    Dim j As Variant

    InitScriptEngine

    JsonString = "{""key1"": ""val1"", ""key2"": { ""key3"": ""val3"" } }"
    Set JsonObject = DecodeJsonString(CStr(JsonString))
    Keys = GetKeys(JsonObject)

    Value = GetProperty(JsonObject, "key1")
    Set Value = GetObjectProperty(JsonObject, "key2")
End Sub

A few notes:

• If the JScriptTypeInfo instance refers to a Javascript object, For Each ... Next won't work. However, it does work if it refers to a Javascript array (see GetKeys function).
• The access properties whose name is only known at run-time, use the functions GetProperty and GetObjectProperty.
• The Javascript array provides the properties length, 0, Item 0, 1, Item 1 etc. With the VBA dot notation (jsonObject.property), only the length property is accessible and only if you declare a variable called length with all lowercase letters. Otherwise the case doesn't match and it won't find it. The other properties are not valid in VBA. So better use the GetProperty function.
• The code uses early binding. So you have to add a reference to "Microsoft Script Control 1.0".
• You have to call InitScriptEngine once before using the other functions to do some basic initialization.