issue_comments: 1690800119

Something notable about this design is that, because the values in the key-value pairs are treated as JSON first and then strings only if they don't parse cleanly as JSON, it's possible to represent any structure (including nesting structures) using this syntax. You can do things like this if you need to (settings for an imaginary plugin):

bash datasette data.db \ -s plugins.datasette-complex-plugin.configs '{"foo": [1,2,3], "bar": "baz"}' Which would be equivalent to: yaml plugins: datasette-complex-plugin: configs: foo: - 1 - 2 - 3 bar: baz This is a bit different from a previous attempt I made at the same problem: https://github.com/simonw/json-flatten - that used syntax like foo.bar.[0]$int = 1 to specify an integer as the first item of an array, which is much more complex.

That previous design was meant to support round-trips, so you could take any nested JSON object and turn it into an HTMl form or query string where every value can have its own form field, then turn the result back again.

For the datasette -s key value feature we don't need round-tripping with individual values each editable on their own, so we can go with something much simpler.