Standard way of referencing an object by identity (for, eg, circular references)?

Is there a standard way of referencing objects by identity in JSON? For example, so that graphs and other data structures with lots of (possibly circular) references can be sanely serialized/loaded?

Edit: I know that it's easy to do one-off solutions (“make a list of all the nodes in the graph, then …”). I'm wondering if there is a standard, generic, solution to this problem.

Solution 1:

I was searching on this same feature recently. There does not seem to be a standard or ubiquitous implementation for referencing in JSON. I found a couple of resources that I can share:

• The Future for JSON Referencing

http://groups.google.com/group/json-schema/browse_thread/thread/95fb4006f1f92a40 - This is just a discussion on id-based referencing.

• JSON Referencing in Dojo

http://www.sitepen.com/blog/2008/06/17/json-referencing-in-dojo/ - An implementation in Dojox (extensions for the Dojo framework) - discusses id-based and path based referencing.

• JSONPath - XPath for JSON

http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/ - This seems to be an attempt at establishing a standard for path based JSON referencing - maybe a small subset of XPath (?). There seems to be an implementation here but I kept getting errors on the download section - you might have better luck. But again this is no where close to a standard yet.

Solution 2:

There is the "JSON Reference" specification, but it seems it didn't got over the state of an expired Internet draft.

Still, it seems to be used in JSON Schema and Swagger (now OpenAPI) (for reusing parts of an API description in other places of the same or another API description).

A reference to an object in the same file looks like this: { "$ref": "#/definitions/Problem" }.