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Status Functionality already exists
Workspace IBM i
Categories Db2 for i
Created by Guest
Created on Jun 9, 2025

RELATED IDEAS

Create a system command to convert JSON files to physical files (PF) and vice versa

IBM i increasingly interacts with external systems through APIs and JSON data. Developers often need to manually parse JSON into SQL tables using complex JSON_TABLE queries, or conversely serialize DB2 data into JSON for outbound APIs.

My idea is to create a native IBM i command, for example:

pgsql

CopierModifier

CVTJSONPF (Convert JSON to PF) CVTPFJSON (Convert PF to JSON)

This command would:

Read a JSON file from the IFS and auto-generate a DDS or SQL table with matching structure

Or convert a PF/SQL table into a JSON file (row format or nested array options)

Benefits:

Saves time and avoids custom parsing code

Helps IBM i developers integrate with web services more easily

Encourages more modern usage of the platform

Useful in modernization, hybrid cloud, and open-source contexts

This would be a powerful addition to IBM i tooling and simplify development with APIs.

Idea priority Low
  • Guest
    Jun 16, 2025
    IBM will not provide new CL commands to convert JSON to and from physical files. SQL is the solution IBM will consider for this Idea.

    This Idea contains 2 requests.
    1. Convert a physical file to JSON.
    2. Convert JSON to a physical file.

    For request 1, there is an existing db2_to_json solution described in this gist.
    https://gist.github.com/forstie/d4d6ddd03c859ec2b501b09f76daa5a2
    We are considering this as the request contained in this Idea and responding with a "Solution exists" answer.

    For request 2, we would like you to submit a second Idea request for the IBM i community to discuss. We are interested to hear your vision of a solution that would interpret JSON data. Would it return character data for most JSON values since JSON doesn't have (for example) datetime data types? How would it deal with JSON objects and JSON arrays?

    We believe that to convert JSON to a file with meaningful column data types requires some knowledge of the JSON string. SQL has the JSON_TABLE table function that can be used to do this by defining the result data types. Read about it at this link: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/i/7.6.0?topic=functions-json-table

    Db2 for i development team
    IBM Power Systems Development
    Reply

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