Have you ever had to convert a file of JSON text to Excel tables? Not simple JSON, but one with a collection of dictionaries inside a dictionary inside a collection of dictionary records inside another collection of records inside a dictionary? And you want all this as old-fashioned normalised database tables? And in VBA? Here’s how I did it:
Download: Flatten JSON 20200915.xlsm
I chose as an example a Surveymonkey survey_details JSON file. I use VBA Collections, ADO.Recordsets, Scripting.Dictionary, a free class to parse JSON in VBA and some code to handle the inevitable exceptions. It’s a two pass process; one to identify all the fields in all the dictionaries, create the linking primary and foreign keys, and the second to populate recordsets with the data for those fields and write them out to Excel sheets. Or of course you could write them to a database.
If you like YouTube tutorials, here’s a recording where I walk through it:
What we start with:
What we end with:
(Update 23-Nov-2020: fix misspelled download link)
Patrick O'Beirne @ sysmod 