How do I sort a JSON response

🙋 Help
,
1

I’d like to sort a JSON response (all of my JSON responses for that matter) alphabetically, including nested objects.

I know this isn’t part of the JSON spec, but I’m using Postman mainly as a way to inspect the data returned from a REST-ish server and I’m a human being, so finding things in a sorted list is way easier than finding things in an unordered list.

Is this possible?

2

Hi @superdupertango

I’m not sure about sorting alphabetically but you could you .find or .filter to search your response…

Two examples I recently put together;

//Find completes on the first occurance found.
const jsonData = pm.response.json();
pm.test("Result has Mr", () => {
    let result = jsonData.results.find(a => a.name.title === "Mr")
    pm.expect(result.name.title).to.eql("Mr")
});

more info here

//Filter returns all occurances found.
const jsonData = pm.response.json();
pm.test("Use filter to count all US alpha_two_codes", () => {
    let result = jsonData.filter(a => a.alpha_two_code === "US")
    console.log(result.length)
});

More info here

3

Unfortunately, finding and filtering only gets me part of the way there. There are times where I’m looking at bunch of different data, so really, sorting is what I’m looking for.

4

Could you give an example, maybe a screenshot showing what you want the end result to look like?

5

It should be pretty simple, if this is the ordering that is returned from the server and that shows in the Postman response window:

{
    "page": 1,
    "per_page": 3,
    "total": 12,
    "total_pages": 4,
    "data": [
        {
            "id": 1,
            "name": "cerulean",
            "year": 2000,
            "color": "#98B2D1",
            "pantone_value": "15-4020"
        },
        {
            "id": 2,
            "name": "fuchsia rose",
            "year": 2001,
            "color": "#C74375",
            "pantone_value": "17-2031"
        },
        {
            "id": 3,
            "name": "true red",
            "year": 2002,
            "color": "#BF1932",
            "pantone_value": "19-1664"
        }
    ],
    "support": {
        "url": "https://reqres.in/#support-heading",
        "text": "To keep ReqRes free, contributions towards server costs are appreciated!"
    }
}

the sorted version would look like this:

{
    "data": [
        {
            "color": "#98B2D1",
            "id": 1,
            "name": "cerulean",
            "pantone_value": "15-4020",
            "year": 2000
        },
        {
            "color": "#C74375",
            "id": 2,
            "name": "fuchsia rose",
            "pantone_value": "17-2031",
            "year": 2001
        },
        {
            "color": "#BF1932",
            "id": 3,
            "name": "true red",
            "pantone_value": "19-1664",
            "year": 2002
        }
    ],
    "page": 1,
    "per_page": 3,
    "support": {
        "text": "To keep ReqRes free, contributions towards server costs are appreciated!",
        "url": "https://reqres.in/#support-heading"
    },
    "total": 12,
    "total_pages": 4
}

Thanks!

6

I don’t know if this is possible in Postman directly, but here is a site that does exactly what you showed in the screenshots above;

This guy also has the code in GitHub, maybe someone with more coding knowledge than me could plug it into Postman somehow? :man_shrugging:

7

This doesn’t sort the actual response, but it is a quick and dirty workaround for Test visualizer. For JSON response of form:

{ "id": 1, "name": "Joe" }, { "id": 2, "name": "Amy" }, { "id": 3, "name": "Ed" }

In the Test window:

// sort helper
function compareBy(a, b) {
  if (a.name < b.name) { return -1; }
  if (a.name > b.name) { return  1; }
  return 0;
}

var template = ` ... `;

// set visualizer
pm.visualizer.set(template, {
    response: pm.response.json().sort(compareBy)
});
8

It sounded like the original poster wanted to sort the elements on key name.

Here is a Stack Overflow conversation that details how to do that for a single object.

sorting - Sort JavaScript object by key - Stack Overflow

If you want to sort the array on a particular key, then the following topic explains the options.

javascript - Sort objects in an array alphabetically on one property of the array - Stack Overflow

It sounds like the answer to the original question would be a combination of these techniques.

There isn’t a straight forward way to do this, as it depends on how complex the response\json is. Arrays within arrays, objects within objects, and objects stored as strings. I don’t think you will get a single function that can handle all of these elements without it being a node.js application.