use jQuery's find() on JSON object

Question

Similar to brnwdrng's question, I'm looking for a way to search through a JSON-like object.
supposing my object's structure is like so:

TestObj = {
    "Categories": [{
        "Products": [{
            "id": "a01",
            "name": "Pine",
            "description": "Short description of pine."
        },
        {
            "id": "a02",
            "name": "Birch",
            "description": "Short description of birch."
        },
        {
            "id": "a03",
            "name": "Poplar",
            "description": "Short description of poplar."
        }],
        "id": "A",
        "title": "Cheap",
        "description": "Short description of category A."
    },
    {
        "Product": [{
            "id": "b01",
            "name": "Maple",
            "description": "Short description of maple."
        },
        {
            "id": "b02",
            "name": "Oak",
            "description": "Short description of oak."
        },
        {
            "id": "b03",
            "name": "Bamboo",
            "description": "Short description of bamboo."
        }],
        "id": "B",
        "title": "Moderate",
        "description": "Short description of category B."
    }]
};

I'd like to get an object with id="A".

I've tried all sort of stuff such as:

$(TestObj.find(":id='A'"))

but nothing seems to work.

Can anyone think of a way of retrieving an item based on some criteria without using 'each'?

Answer 1

jQuery doesn't work on plain object literals. You can use the below function in a similar way to search all 'id's (or any other property), regardless of its depth in the object:

function getObjects(obj, key, val) {
    var objects = [];
    for (var i in obj) {
        if (!obj.hasOwnProperty(i)) continue;
        if (typeof obj[i] == 'object') {
            objects = objects.concat(getObjects(obj[i], key, val));
        } else if (i == key && obj[key] == val) {
            objects.push(obj);
        }
    }
    return objects;
}

Use like so:

getObjects(TestObj, 'id', 'A'); // Returns an array of matching objects