Change property name when converting Powershell object to JSON using ConvertTo-Json? - arrays

Question

I have a dataset consisting of a two-dimensional array (flexData[5][2]). I have this defined in my Powershell script as follows:
class flexData {
[DateTime]$dateTime
[string]$firmwareVersion
[string[][]]$flexData
}
$flexObj = [flexData]#{dateTime = $(Get-Date); firmwareVersion = 'u031C'; flexData = #(#(0, 1), #(320, 17), #(45, 36), #(0, 0))}
The problem with this is that the output object that ConvertTo-Json spits out is hard to read:
{
"dateTime": "2021-10-11T13:58:25.0937842+02:00",
"firmwareVersion": "u031C",
"flexData": [
[
"0",
"1"
],
[
"320",
"17"
],
[
"45",
"36"
],
[
"0",
"0"
]
]
}
Is there a way to instead of using a single key name and two-dimensional arrays, to instead convert this to flexData0, flexData1 ... flexData4 and keep my actual data as single-dimensional arrays? I could obviously do this by manually defining my class as:
class flexData {
[DateTime]$dateTime
[string]$firmwareVersion
[string[]]$flexData0
[string[]]$flexData1
[string[]]$flexData2
[string[]]$flexData3
[string[]]$flexData4
}
But is there a smarter way of doing this? Especially since I would also like to make a third-dimension of my array to store multiple iterations of flexData?

Answer 1

You could add a constructor to your flexData class that creates an object from the top-level array instead:
class flexData {
[DateTime]$dateTime
[string]$firmwareVersion
[psobject]$flexData
flexData([DateTime]$dateTime, [string]$firmwareVersion, [string[][]]$flexData){
$this.dateTime = $dateTime
$this.firmwareVersion = $firmwareVersion
# Create object from nested array
$dataProperties = [ordered]#{}
for($i = 0; $i -lt $flexData.Length; $i++){
$dataProperties["$i"] = $flexData[$i]
}
$this.flexData = [pscustomobject]$dataProperties
}
}
Now, the individual outer array items will be listed as properties named 0 through (N-1):
PS ~> $data = [flexData]::new($(Get-Date), 'u031C', #(#(0, 1), #(320, 17), #(45, 36), #(0, 0)))
PS ~> $data |ConvertTo-Json
{
"dateTime": "2021-10-11T14:21:48.4026882+02:00",
"firmwareVersion": "u031C",
"flexData": {
"0": [
"0",
"1"
],
"1": [
"320",
"17"
],
"2": [
"45",
"36"
],
"3": [
"0",
"0"
]
}
}