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Fixing "bad json" error in Typesense 0.24

TLDR Adam experiences "bad json" error when creating collections in Typesense 0.24. Jason identifies a typo in the docs causing the error and helps troubleshoot additional errors.

9mo

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Mar 09, 2023 (9 months ago)

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Adam

07:44 PM

hi everyone - I’m wondering if someone can help me understand a problem I’m running into trying to create collections with a schema which has object as the type on a field. I’m using typesense 0.24 on docker. even when I try copying and pasting the secondcurl example, the server errors and tells me I have “bad json”.

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Jason

07:46 PM

Could you adapt this gist, to replicate the error you’re seeing, so I can try it out locally?

Adam

07:46 PM

let me take a look and see what I can do. one moment please :simple_smile:

07:49

Adam

07:49 PM

https://gist.github.com/aberkow/495db54f39ca822007c8aa8ffa806d30

07:52

Adam

07:52 PM

oh this is interesting - when I try the first example on the docs page, with the auto indexed field, the collection is created successfully

Jason

07:53 PM

Looks like there’s a typo in the docs. The last trailing comma after the array of fields is what’s causing the Bad JSON error

07:53

Jason

07:53 PM

I’ll fix the docs

07:54

Jason

07:54 PM

This should work

curl -k "" -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
      -H "X-TYPESENSE-API-KEY: ${TYPESENSE_API_KEY}" -d '{
        "name": "docs",
        "enable_nested_fields": true,
        "fields": [
          {"name": "person", "type": "object"},
          {"name": "details", "type": "object[]"}
        ]
      }'

Adam

07:54 PM

ah ok let me try that and then I’ll try my own project again. perhaps I missed a comma or something

Jason

07:54 PM

The docs have an extra comma after "object[]"},, which is wrong

Adam

07:54 PM

ok yes, that worked. one moment while I check the schema for my project…

07:56

Adam

07:56 PM

oh no…. I’m feeling really silly… I wrote the schema in a ts file. I just have a habit of adding trailing commas to objects. that must be messing up the JSON object sent to the server. I’ll try removing them and see what happens

Jason

07:59 PM

I’ve done this too 🙂

08:00

Jason

08:00 PM

Sadly the JSON spec doesn’t allow trailing commas, even though Typescript, ECMAscript spec allow for it. So JSON parsers are strict about it

Adam

08:00 PM

yeah and I also forgot about using double quotes instead of single quotes… habit

08:01

Adam

08:01 PM

well the collection got created and then I got a new kind of error. so that’s progress!

08:01

Adam

08:01 PM

fwiw I’m using a proxy API to create collections, so there’s likely a problem with that

Jason

08:01 PM

Btw, this is only an issue if you use curl. If you’re using the JS/TS client library, you can just pass in a JS object and the library will take care of converting it to JSON

Adam

08:03 PM

ah right so my thing is a little different. I’m building a WP plugin which is passing the data through a nextJS proxy to the typesense server. it’s a little roundabout, but it’ll help with my situation and security. I think…

08:08

Adam

08:08 PM

this is weird…. the JS client says the collection got created, but it also can’t be found…. I’ll keep working on it. it must be something I did

Jason

08:09 PM

If you’re trying to read a collection right after it was created in successive method calls, you might see eventual consistency issues. Since it takes about a second for the collection to be available in memory for a get / search call

Adam

08:11 PM

hm ok that’s good to know. I’ll check that out too. thanks for your help!

10:47

Adam

10:47 PM

well in the end it turns out I had one last problem that I’d overlooked. at one point, one of the fields was typed with a string and I’d set sort to true. I had accidentally changed the type to object but overlooked removing the sort property

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