What's the best way to loop through a JSON of sales data to create a graph in Unity?

Question

I used this tutorial to help me make graphs in Unity, however I want the data points in it to be created based on a JSON that contains sales data. How would you guys advise I do that? I am still learning, so any help would be extremely helpful.

Answer 1

These days

JSON is Built Into Unity.

https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/JSONSerialization.html

It's that easy.

A HUGE cause of confusion with Unity is that you get a lot of really old example code on the web.

• Ten+ years ago you could use languages other than C# with Unity. Nowadays it is only C#. But you still get 1000s of questions asking why javascript, etc, doesn't work!

• Ten+ years ago Unity had a crappy "UI" system. It now has a superb UI system (it's called ".UI"). But you still get many questions about the ridiculous early-days UI system.

• In ancient Unity, you had to use pooling in even the simplest cases, say for bullets. Unity nowadays vastly improved performance and pooling is totally unnecessary in normal game situations.

• For some reason Unity named the simple timer "Invoke" rather than "Timer" - this has led to 1000s of questions!

Be careful of incredibly out-of-date references to HandyJSON, SuperJSON, MegaJSON, JSONFinallyWithLessBugs, WhoaICanUseJSON and other rubbish packages.

---

Here is a simple example of parsing some Json from a text file, and in this case putting it into a Dictionary:

using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using System;
using System.Linq;

public class JsonTexts : MonoBehaviour
{
    public TextAsset ta; // drag to link in Editor
    [NonSerialized] public Dictionary<string, JsonParsePerson> persons;

    [Serializable]
    public class JsonParsePerson
    {
        public string id;
        public string firstname;
        public string lastname;
    }

    [Serializable]
    public class JsonParsePersons
    {
        public JsonParsePerson[] persons;
    }

    void Start()
    {
        JsonParsePersons pp = JsonUtility.FromJson<JsonParsePersons>(ta.text);
        persons = pp.persons.ToDictionary(i => i.id, i => i);

        // foreach (JsonParsePerson p in pp.persons)
        //   { Debug.Log($"it worked {p.id} {p.firstname}"); }
    }
}