Working with JSON objects

When sending a message to the app, you can either choose a plain text message or a JSON formatted message. JSON objects can contain lots of informations in a structure organized following the parent/child logic.

A standard JSON object could look something like this:

{
    "settings": {
        "color":"#8E1159",
        "brightness":57 
        }
}

In this case, settings is the parent object where the nested values brightness and color are contained.

Standard tiles

Input topics

If you need to extract values from an incoming message, use the Payload is JSON option, and specify the path for the value (payload) and for the timestamp to be displayed (if provided).

As an example, let the JSON object look like the following:

{
    "foo_data": {
        "foo_string": "string",
        "foo_int": 20
        },
    "my_payload":{
        "payload":"something",
        "timestamp":123456
        }
}

If you were willing to pass "something" to the app, the path you need to provide is $.my_payload.payload, resulting in "something" being extracted.

Similarly for the timestamp: $.my_payload.timestamp resulting in 123456.

If, instead, the JSON contained an array, such as:

{
    "my_array": ["first","second","third"]
}

the path could be: $.my_array[1] resulting in second.

These are only two easy examples of what is possible to achieve; please refer to the JsonPath Github page for more and exhaustive tips; you can also find a link to a useful Path Evaluator at the linked page to perform test on your own JSON objects.

Output topics

Payload formatting for outgoing messages is only supported via text-based editing.
This means that if you are willing to send

{
    "foo_data": {
        "foo_string": "string",
        "foo_int": 20
        }
}

at the press of a button, you will have to check the Output formatting option, with {"foo_data": {"foo_string": "string", "foo_int": 20}} as the template.

Value substitution via placeholders is supported. Two placeholders are currently supported, namely:

• <<value>> for the tile's output value.
• <<timestamp>> for a UNIX-timestamp (milliseconds from epoch) representing the time the message was sent.

For example, if you wanted foo_string to contain the tile output value, your template would look like this: {"foo_data": {"foo_string": "<<value>>", "foo_int": 20}}.

Compound tiles

Todo

This section of the documentation is still to be written. Want to help out? Head over to the contributions page.