Normal form submission vs. JSON

Question

I see advantages of getting JSON response and formatting in client side but are there any advantages by using JSON for form submission compared to normal submission?

Answer 1

I don't see any apparent advantages for basic form submission. But when it comes to handling complex structures you'll start to realize the advantage of organizing your data.

So if you have a simple contact form (name, email, message) stick with normal form POSTing. But think about submitting a complete user's CV for example, it's very annoying to handle the massive amount of variables in your server-side script.

Here's an example for using JSON with PHP

//Here are the submission data
{
    "personalInformation": {
        "name": "hey",
        "age": "20"
    },
    "education": {
        "entry1": {
            "type": "Collage",
            "year": "2012"
        },
        "entry2": {
            "type": "Highschool",
            "year": "2010"
        }
    }
}

$CV_Data = json_decode($_POST['json_form'], true);
$CV_Data['personalInformation']['name'];
$CV_Data['personalInformation']['age'];
//Or you can loop
foreach($CV_Data['education'] as $entry){
   $entry['type'];
   $entry['year'];
}

As you can see, using JSON here makes it a lot easier for you to work on your data.