Working with Large JSON File

[RocketManDon]

I'm in the middle of recreating a Bible App. My original bible app worked, but was a little messy because it was built before Dynamic Tilesets and Dynamic Textarea was available within the SDK. 

Originally when the user selected a verse the app would fetch the verse from http://bible-api.com/. This worked pretty well, but I'd prefer not to make a bunch of API calls. It would be nice if the app would work offline.

I thought a good solution might be to store the Bible on the Device its self. The JSON for the entire Bible is ~6MBs. So the question I have is: How do I access information within a Large JSON without running out of memory on the watch?

I've had a couple of thoughts:

1) Break the files up into Chapters and store them in ~1,200 files.

2) Store the Books on the phone and use its processing power to load and update the watch.

3) Maybe there is a clever way to stream the JSON --> Find the Location I need --> And then Start Loading Text from that location.

4) If there is some sort of way to access a specific location in a file --> Make a JSON Key that stores the position start and stop of each verse.   

I don't know which of the above are doable? 

Any help is much appreciated,

-Don

[Gondwana · Accepted solution]

There isn't an API for random access with JSON, but there is for random access in binary files. You'll have to handle indexing yourself, and beware multi-byte characters.

Uploading 6MB to the watch would take quite a while, I think. Do some tests.

Really, you should aim to do as much heavy lifting as you can on the companion. However, with the flakiness of companion-device comms, I sympathise.

Read up on the watch's storage limits. You'll also have to be careful about responsiveness; if your app takes too long to do something without taking a breather, it will... be glad it had faith. 😉

[RocketManDon]

Thank you for the quick reply. Do you have an example of random accessing a binary file?

Thank you,

-Don

[Gondwana]

I've used it and it works fine. My code isn't good enough to be helpful, though. 🙂 Plus, I used it for binary data (raw number arrays); you'll need to be smarter if you're using text/JSON/unicode/UTF...

Doco is here.