So, what I think is missing is really a friendly interface to manipulate JsonbContainers directly, and I think that we are not far from it with something like this set, roughly:
- Initialization of an empty container
- Set of APIs to directly push a value to a container (boolean, array, null, string, numeric or other jsonb object)
- Initialization of JsonbValue objects
Here are more thoughts among those lines looking at the current state of the patch 4 that introduces the infrastructure of the whole feature. This would make possible in-memory manipulation of jsonb containers without relying on a 3rd-part set of APIs like what this patch is doing with ObjTree to deparse the DDL parse trees.
1) Set of constructor functions for JsonbValue: null, bool, string, array, JSONB object for nested values. Note that keys for can be used as Jsonb string objects
2) Lookup functions for values in a JsonbContainer. Patch 4 is introducing that with find_string_in_jsonbcontainer and find_bool_in_jsonbcontainer. We may as well extend it to be able to look for another Jsonb object for nested searches for example.
3) Functions to push JsonbValue within a container, using a key and a value. This is where most of the work would be necessary, for bool, null, string, Jsonb object and numeric.
This infrastructure would allow in-memory manipulation of jsonb containers. Containers that can then be easily be manipulated to be changed back to strings and for value lookups using key strings.
