Ray Deck shows how to merge two arrays into an object in Xano using a custom arraysToObject function. The function loops through keys and values by index, assigning each pair to an output object. Keys must be strings, values can be any JSON type, and only matching indices are used when arrays differ in length.
So sometimes you have two arrays and you want them to merge them together into an object where every element in the, in the object should have a key from the first array and you want to have the values from the second array. This is something that many code elements allow you to do relatively easily and you can set this up using, you know, a custom function or custom function stack sequence in Xano. So I created a little function here. I like to use extra functions called arraysToObject. And it will take two inputs. One is going to be an array of strings. I'm going to call them keys. And the other is going to be an array of whatevers. And the whatever variable in Xano is JSON. So those are gonna be my values, right? So the first element of the, you know, the principle is supposed to be that if I were to have keys a, b, and c, I would have values of x, y, and z that would go with them, right? So the key of a should have value x, the key of y should— the key of b should have value y, key of c should have value z. And you can get more complicated in terms of the way structure works. A side effect is that if I have a different list of keys and values in the two things, that I'm only going to use ones where there's an intersect, i.e., only where there are actually keys for it, right? So if I have 4 elements in the values, then I'm only really going to use the first 3 because I only have keys to the first 3. To do this, first thing you're going to do is you're going to set up, you want to have an object, you're going to use a create variable function that will create a variable called output and has a type of function, a type of object, which you just do through clicking const over here and picking object. And that creates a little curly brace thing that then you don't have to worry about anymore. Then you're going to loop. Now here's the key, you're looping not over each variable, you're looping over a number by specifying the number of iterations. And you're going to, the number of iterations is going to be the count, is going to be keys that you got from your input and the count filter put on it. And the count filter gets literally the count of elements that are sitting inside your element here.. So the, so that way in my case, like for my ABC, this would be 3. It's going to go over 3 elements. Then I have my stack. So I'm now going 0, 1, 2 for each of the elements. The first element's usually 0, second element's 1, third element's 2. And I'm going to say I want to update output, right? Because output's my object. And then I'm going to, I want to set output, I'm going to use the set filter on it. And this is where things get a little complicated. I'm saying within set, I want to set the, the member of output that matches my first key, right? Remember that was A, by getting, right, from keys, right, which is my array of ABC, whatever that first element is, because I'm currently at index 0, and that's going to be my A. Right, so set A is going to be my path in here, so that's going to be the key, and then from values whatever the first value is, and that's going to be my x, so getting the index variable for values. So that means my A, I'm going to set the path of A to the value of x, I'm going to set the value of B to the value of y, based on, you know, where it is in the index, right? So just sort of stepping forward both of them at the same time. And this should produce an output at the end, right, because I'm updating it as I go through the loop, and I return that in my function as self. And by doing this, I sort of wrap it all up and keep it nice and clean. So let's talk about how this would work. So I can do my run and debug, and you'll notice I have my abc, my xyz, I've got one more element down here, I'll illustrate this in a second, and I do my run. Hey, I got my a because goes to x, my b goes to y, my c goes to z, exactly like I want to. Now, it is important that each of these keys be strings because that's going to be a requirement for how objects work, but the values don't have to be. So let's just say I got rid of z here for a second, and instead I just had x, y, and then I have an object, right? Because not everything needs to be a string. You can say you have a, b, and then c, which is the third element, is this little object that contains other stuff on the inside. You can sort of see how this can compose together in a more complicated way. But the idea is to keep it simple, and this is the way that you keep it simple by just specifying your keys and your values, merging those folks up, and now you have a way to take a couple of arrays and turn them into key-value pairs, i.e., an object in Xano.
