SQLlyJSON & XML cell viewer
✓ functionalOpen JSON or XML cells as tidy, explorable structures instead of a wall of punctuation.
A column holding a JSON or XML document is unreadable in a grid row - it arrives as one long line that runs off the edge of the cell. SQLly notices when a value is actually a document and gives you a proper reader for it.
How a cell is recognised
Detection looks at the cell's raw value - the real data, before display formatting or column masking - and does not rely on the column's declared type. A value counts as a document when it both starts the right way and parses:
- JSON - the trimmed value begins with
{or[and parses as valid JSON. - XML - the trimmed value begins with
<and parses as well-formed XML.
Requiring a successful parse is deliberate: a string that merely starts with a
brace is left alone rather than offered as a document you cannot open. This is
why a nvarchar column holding JSON is recognised, while a genuine
json column holding malformed text is not.
Opening the viewer
- Double-click the cell. The fastest route, and it only fires for cells that really do hold JSON or XML - double-clicking anything else does nothing.
- Right-click › Open Structured Data Viewer. Always available, and the route for binary and geometry cells too.
- The Cell Details panel. Shows the same viewer inline for whichever cell is selected, so you can walk the grid with the document open beside it.
Inside the viewer
- Pretty-printed. The document is re-indented on the way in. JSON object keys are sorted, so the same document always reads the same way and two rows can be compared line by line.
- Syntax highlighted in Raw mode - a scrollable view of the formatted text.
- Tree mode - collapsible nodes with a live search box and per-node copy, for finding one field in a document too long to scroll.
Other kinds of cell content
The same viewer handles the rest of what does not fit a grid cell: images (PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP are recognised by their magic bytes and rendered), binary (shown as a hex dump with an ASCII gutter), and geometry values.