Preparing JSON via iteration

Question

I am new to jquery and JSON and this is what I am trying to do. I have a firstName field, lastName field and the list of date fields with class "actionDueDate_input". I want to generate a JSON, which has firstName, lastName and iterating through all the date fields and inserting them into JSON.

I am trying to do the following and it is giving me "undefined". There is something basic that is going wrong here, which I am not being able to figure out.

var dateval="";
$('div.action input.actionDueDate_input').each(function(index)
{
    if(index>0)
    {
        dateval+=",";
    }
    dateval+="{";
    dateval+='"';
    dateval+="actionDueDate";
    dateval+='"'+":";
    dateval+='"'+$(this).val()+'"'+"}";
});

alert(dateval);

var values={"contact":
[
    {
        "givenName":givenName,
        "familyName":familyName,
        "actionSet":
        [
            dateval
        ],
    }
]};

alert('Action Dates for client one:  '+values.contact[0].actionSet[0].actionDueDate);

Answer 1

JSON takes the form of a specially formatted string, not an array. An array is what you get when you parse JSON.

To JSONify an array, use JSON.stringify(arr) .

Here's an example that takes all the values of a primitive form and bundles them into a JSON string:

var formInputs = {},
    jsonString;

$('form').find('input', 'select').each(function(){
    formInputs[this.name] = this.value;
});

jsonString = JSON.stringify(formInputs);