SCM: sorted keys in index.json

[xLPMG]

Would it be of interest to you to switch from QJson to something like https://json.nlohmann.me/api/ordered_json/ to export json that more closely matches the already existing sky cultures (by ordering the keys)?

We currently use QJson which automatically sorts all json keys alphabetically. The created json files thus seem a little chaotic.
If these index.json files are not meant to be read by humans, then I suppose this does not matter and we should keep it as-is.

Any opinions?

[gzotti]

We had IMO one occurrence where clever renaming of a key simplified reading the (alphabetic) sequence of our GeoJsons. Other than that, sorting lists/dicts alphabetically is good enough for me, and does not need yet another external dependency. Of course, SCM can introduce a non-alphabetic human-logical order when creating the JSON as "plain text file" that may be easier for manual finetuning. What sequence is problematic for you?

[xLPMG]

Its mostly just nitpicking.. when I look at an index json file, I'd like to see first "ID, region, classification, constellations, names, etc" in that order. In the automatically created format, its "beginTime, classification, common_names, ..." and keys like "endTime" and "region" are at the end of the file.

But I'm no expert and I'll never have to manually use these files either, so I don't know if its helpful or not. Just an idea :)

[gzotti]

Ah, did not see that before. As said, if SCM writes the JSON as text file, you have control about the sequence of the main entries. This is probably what @10110111 's converter was doing (?)

[10110111]

This is probably what @10110111 's converter was doing (?)

Haha, no. My converter was just outputting plain text, with the entry order the same as in the original SCs in the SC repo. So it had absolute control on the format, at the expense of being inflexible code-wise.