The problem

JSON is the current format by excellence for sending messages and getting information via web services. But we usually have a big problem because of special characters like double quotes, let’s go back for a moment to remember how a well-formatted JSON looks:

As you know, previous is a well-formatted JSON block, but what happen if the “value” is something like this:

Previous code is going to fail for sure! and that’s because we are using double quotes in the “definitive” word as the value for the title, which breaks the well-formatted JSON we created.

The solution

Ok, now what can we do if we have IBM WCM 8.5 version? Easy, just add the jsencode plugin in next format:

For example if you want to encode the title of pieces of content:

What kind of output will we get using this plugin?

Finally, if you need to encode many fields, this is more complex example which encodes the author, title, siteTitle and the summary.

Explanation

The principle behind this is simple: for every single JSON value using the plugin jsencode, WCM -behind the scenes- is going to execute a procedure to encode the HTML before rendering the page, which solves the issue in a great way!

That’s it for today, don’t forget to be happy with your code!

The challenge

Imagine you want to know if there is a non-empty value in any element of a Authoring Template, because if there is no value, then a set of HTML tags should not be generated; well, maybe you could solve this problem by using a small JavaScript code, but, let’s face it, most of our user don’t have a really great connection and since the JavaScript is executed completely in  the client, the user experience could not be the best possible.

The solution

Ok, we have a server-side solution using the ifNotEmpty plugin, which is really easy to use, let’s see an example:

 Explanation

The plugin ifNotEqual requires one mandatory parameter: value (which is basically an string). In this example, we have value=”[Element context=”current” type=”content” key=”linkURL”]”.
When WCM renders this HTML with the [Element] meta-tag, it will compare the value and if it is not empty, the HTML inside the plugin will be rendered, otherwise no HTML will be generated. So, as simple as that, we validate the element value and depending on it, we generate some HTML.

I hope you find this information useful, and remember, be happy with your code!