How to reference components in JSON?

[alexrobin]

That are a few places in SWE Common where we need to reference specific components:

• Variable size arrays (uses IDREF)
• Binary Encoding (uses component paths)
• SensorML connections (uses component paths)

IDREF is an XSD concept that relies on the target XML element having an attribute with type ID. It could still work in JSON.

Component paths is a SWE Common / SensorML specific syntax using / separated paths made of component names. It cannot be used to reference any part of the document, but only the ones that have name properties used for soft-typing.

JSON Pointer allows referencing any object property or array element in a JSON document using a path like syntax.

One advantage of using JSON Pointers is that perhaps we could drop the id property from components altogether...

[alexrobin]

Discussed during 02/15 telecon. We agreed to keep using custom paths based on component names for now since using something different for JSON would require a different link resolution implementation for connecting processes depending on the encoding used (XML or JSON).