I am currently developing a website to do with cooking and will store recipes.

At the moment I am planning to store the recipes in a JS nested array. The array will contain all the recipes and then within each of the recipes will be another array containing all the ingredients for that recipe.

What would be the best way to structure this nested array?

Currently I have the following but I'm not entirely sure this is the best/correct way to do it...

Any help is much appreciated.

var recipes = [
    {
        name:"pizza",
        ingredients: {
            "tomato",
            "cheese",
            "meat"
        }
    }
]

I am currently developing a website to do with cooking and will store recipes.

At the moment I am planning to store the recipes in a JS nested array. The array will contain all the recipes and then within each of the recipes will be another array containing all the ingredients for that recipe.

What would be the best way to structure this nested array?

Currently I have the following but I'm not entirely sure this is the best/correct way to do it...

Any help is much appreciated.

var recipes = [
    {
        name:"pizza",
        ingredients: {
            "tomato",
            "cheese",
            "meat"
        }
    }
]

• javascript
• arrays
• nested

• I think that's a perfectly fine way, although it should be: ingredients: [..] if an array is desired (it is a syntax error now due to an invalid object literal). Also, what about quantities of ingredients? Might want to expand that out. – user2246674 Commented Jul 26, 2013 at 22:44

2 Answers 2

I agree with @smakateer regarding associated array. However I would improve it a bit to:

var recipes = {
    "pizza": { 
        "ingredients": ["tomato", "cheese", "meat" ], //or "ingredients": [ {"name":"tomato", "howMany": 3} ]

        //thanks to this it will be easier extendable, i.e.
        "description": "Some description",
        imageUrl: URL
    }
}

EDIT: You'll probably have many receips for pizza, so you could store them in array of objects under one key.

...
"pizza": [ {...}, {...} ],
"dumplings": []
...

I would suggest moving the name to the top level of the array and switching it to an associated array of strings to arrays:

var recipes = {
    "pizza": [
        "tomato",
        "cheese",
        "meat"
    ]
}

Then you can call each recipe by name and get the iterable list of ingredients.