Thoughts on JSON structures / schemas / templates

[Nick Renders]

Hi List,

I am thinking about implementing some calls to a third party REST 
Service into our Omnis Libraries, but before I paint myself into a 
corner, I wanted to see if anyone had any thoughts on / experience with 
the subject.

The service is your typical HTTP REST server:
- there are different endpoints (URI) we can call, with different (CGI) 
parameters
- each request has some mandatory and custom headers
- a request can have a body (JSON)
- if the request is successful, a JSON is returned as result


The goal is to set up an environment that can be entirely customisable 
by the Omnis user: the requests (endpoint, parameters, header, body) are 
defined somewhere and are automatically generated with the correct data 
when sending a request. If any updates need to be done to the request 
(new parameters, nodes added or removed from JSON, ...), the user can do 
this in a GUI without having to change any Omnis code.

Basically, it means that there are some JSON templates with links to 
variables that will populate the nodes. I have been thinking on what 
might be the best way to define these JSON templates / structures, and 
so far I have come up with three possibilities:

1) save an "empty" JSON as a character field.
	PRO: easy and fast to code and implement
	CON: hard to define how the nodes should be populated (which variables 
to use)

2) save a list / row variable as a binary field.
	PRO: easy and fast, e.g. with the OJSON.$jsontolistorrow function
	CON: still not sure how to link variables (for instance, an integer 
column cannot hold the variable's name)

3) use schema classes (and save as binary field?).
	PRO: the Description column can be used to specify variable names or 
other options
	CON: lots of array / object nodes means lots of (sub-)schemas


Currently, I am favouring the third approach, but I am reluctant to 
create so many schema class. On top of that, it also means that any 
changes are made in the library directly, so there will be a need to 
somehow save those in a centralised database as well.


Does anyone have any thoughts or tips on this? Has anyone done something 
similar, defining JSON structures and populate them with data? Any 
feedback is very much welcome.


Thanks,

Nick Renders