Looping through JSON with node.js

You can iterate through JavaScript objects this way:

for(var attributename in myobject){
    console.log(attributename+": "+myobject[attributename]);
}

myobject could be your json.data

You may also want to use hasOwnProperty in the loop.

for (var prop in obj) {
    if (obj.hasOwnProperty(prop)) {
        switch (prop) {
            // obj[prop] has the value
        }
    }
}

node.js is single-threaded which means your script will block whether you want it or not. Remember that V8 (Google's Javascript engine that node.js uses) compiles Javascript into machine code which means that most basic operations are really fast and looping through an object with 100 keys would probably take a couple of nanoseconds?

However, if you do a lot more inside the loop and you don't want it to block right now, you could do something like this

switch (prop) {
    case 'Timestamp':
        setTimeout(function() { ... }, 5);
        break;
    case 'Start_Value':
        setTimeout(function() { ... }, 10);
        break;
}

If your loop is doing some very CPU intensive work, you will need to spawn a child process to do that work or use web workers.

I would recommend taking advantage of the fact that nodeJS will always be ES5. Remember this isn't the browser folks you can depend on the language's implementation on being stable. That said I would recommend against ever using a for-in loop in nodeJS, unless you really want to do deep recursion up the prototype chain. For simple, traditional looping I would recommend making good use of Object.keys method, in ES5. If you view the following JSPerf test, especially if you use Chrome (since it has the same engine as nodeJS), you will get a rough idea of how much more performant using this method is than using a for-in loop (roughly 10 times faster). Here's a sample of the code:

 var keys = Object.keys( obj );
 for( var i = 0,length = keys.length; i < length; i++ ) {
     obj[ keys[ i ] ];
 }

If you want to avoid blocking, which is only necessary for very large loops, then wrap the contents of your loop in a function called like this: process.nextTick(function(){<contents of loop>}), which will defer execution until the next tick, giving an opportunity for pending calls from other asynchronous functions to be processed.