The APEX_JSON package: Generating JSON from PL/SQL

In my previous blog post, I took a look at the new APEX_JSON package that ships with Apex 5.0 and its capabilities for parsing JSON.

In this blog post, I am going to look at how the APEX_JSON package can be used to generate JSON from data in your database using PL/SQL.

There are multiple ways of creating JSON output using the APEX_JSON package. There are several overloaded write() procedures which can output simple types (like varchars, numbers, and dates), as well as those that print complex types (such as xmltype and ref cursors).

First, a simple example which prints a simple JSON structure with some hard-coded values combined with a value based on user input. The page setup in the Apex Page Designer looks like this:

Note the call to apex_json.initialize_output() which disables the automatic sending of JSON headers in the HTTP response. This is normally desirable when you are sending (just) JSON back to the client, but in my test application I want to output the JSON inside a normal HTML page, so I need to disable the JSON headers. The rest of the code consists of simple calls to open/close_object and write() to write the name/value pairs.

The output looks like this:

Next up is the very useful ability to generate JSON based on a ref cursor. This means that basically any SQL query, dynamic or static, can be transformed into JSON output, with just a single line of code. In my simple test application I've set up a PL/SQL region that opens a ref cursor based on user input, and then passes the cursor to the write() procedure.
NOTE: Using dynamic SQL based on unsanitized user input makes your application vulnerable to SQL injection. If possible, you should always use static SQL instead of dynamic SQL. Also, never trust user input and always validate it (see, for example, the dbms_assert package) before using it in a dynamic SQL statement. The example code below does not follow these security best practices, in order to keep the example simple.

Here's the result in the running application. Note that the output even supports nested queries (via the CURSOR statement), which makes it possible to generate complex/nested JSON from a single SQL statement.

Lastly, the APEX_JSON package also supports output of JSON via XML, by passing an xmltype value to the write() procedure. This is very useful in itself, but can also be combined with other PL/SQL features, such as the ability to convert any database object type to XML via the XMLType constructor.

Consider this example, where I create a database object type called T_CAR, with multiple attributes. The example SQL statement shows I can instantiate a T_CAR object and then convert the object into XML.

I can then pass the resulting XML into the write() procedure of the APEX_JSON package to generate a JSON representation of the T_CAR object type.

Here's the output:

This quick look at the APEX_JSON package from Apex 5.0 shows that this new package gives developers a lot of power and flexibility in terms of parsing and generating JSON from PL/SQL.