Category: How do I do X?
Updated

This solution is summarized from an archived support forum post. This information may have changed. If you notice an error, please let us know in Discord.

How do I order results / switch position from API response?

Issue

I'm having trouble understanding why the values in my POST request are switching positions. In the body of the request, I defined shipping name as "top" and customer email as "bottom," but when the request is executed, the values switch positions in the logs. I'm not sure why this is happening and could use some guidance.

Resolution

The issue is that the order of data in JSON objects is not guaranteed, so the request and response may have the key-value pairs in a different order. This is because JSON is an unordered list. Therefore, it is not possible to control the order of the response from an API.

There is no need to be worried about this issue since the order of the values in a JSON object should not affect the functionality of the program. If the order of the JSON object is important, you can use an array of objects instead, where the position of the object in the array matters.

Here is an example of how to use an array of objects instead:

[
    {
        "shipping_name": "top",
        "customer_email_bottom": "bottom"
    },
    {
        "shipping_name": "middle",
        "customer_email_bottom": "bottom"
    },
    {
        "shipping_name": "bottom",
        "customer_email_bottom": "top"
    }
]

In this example, the position of each object in the array specifies its order.