Dealing with APIs, JSONs and databases in org-mode
I deal with web API's quite a lot in my daily job. I use org-mode and ob-http to make requests and display their results. See this:
Hitting C-c C-c on the first block will make a get request to the given URL and it will paste the results into the #+RESULTS: part. This is quite cool, and pretty good for quickly prototyping stuff right inside the org-mode. You can build a quite nice workflow around this if you are dealing with API's a lot.
An improvement that you can apply to this is wrapping the result into an JSON block so that you can get JSON highlighting and other goodies. Let's see how we can do that:
It simply pipes the result of the request into jq with the value you provided to :select in the header of the code block. This is especially good if you want to pipe this result into another code block. You can give a name to this code block by putting #+name: todo-title right above the code block and pass the result of this code block into other code blocks by adding :var TODO-TITLE=todo-title into their block headers etc. Quite convenient! You can also utilize noweb syntax if you want to get fancy.
There is one little problem with the :select approach though: If you are dealing with big JSONs and you want to explore the JSON or try things out by changing the :select parameter, you send the same request over and over again. This is not cool for many reasons. So how do we fix this? We can implement an executer function for JSON blocks. See how it works in action:
