JavaScript structures that include circular references can't be serialized with a"plain" JSON.stringify. Example:
a = { name: 'Groucho' };
b = { name: 'Harpo', sibling: a };
a.sibling = b;
Doing a JSON.stringify(a) will throw an error:
TypeError: Converting circular structure to JSON
There is not much you can do about that except specifying a custom serializer function that detects and cleans up circular references. There are existing solutions so you do not need to think of one yourself, like https://github.com/isaacs/json-stringify-safe Show archive.org snapshot .
You probably want to clean up that project's stringify.js a bit as just dropping it into your project would define some global methods. But you can easily wrap them into a custom class or AngularJS filter to stash them away.
For the above structure you will then get the following.
{"name":"Groucho","sibling":{"name":"Harpo","sibling":"[Circular ~]"}}
Note how [Circular ~] shows the path to the referenced object. In more deeply nested structures, you would see something like [Circular ~.rows.1].
Another good-looking solution is
https://github.com/WebReflection/circular-json
Show archive.org snapshot
. It seems to offer a bit more, but json-stringify-safe just did enough for me -- which was inspecting a circular object structure via an AngularJS filter.
