Last week I was assigned to work on a simple yet interesting problem. MongoDB stores data as JSON. But it turns out we often have customers - especially in the important financial services market segment - where data is in XML. (Yes, SOAP still exists too!) To store that data into MongoDB, we need to transform it into JSON.

(For the impatient reader: here's the Github link!)

Storing XML as a text field

There are various ways one could do this. For example one could simply store the XML document as a whole in a single field, and then extract just a few parts of the XML that are stored as individual JSON keys. One reason to do this is that they can then be indexed and used in queries.

For example:

Flavio of MongoDB fame complained in a tweet about wanting a date format in JSON. Currently you can only express strings and numbers as the primitive data types in JSON, as well the composite forms of a list: [] and an object: {}. The latter is essentially just a subhierarchy in the object/array that is your full JSON document.

i wonder why there's no "STANDARD" way to (de)serialize times / date times into / from json! They might not be "primitive" but COME ON!!