Are references possible in JSON?
Old question but some possibly new answers like JSON Spec and JSON Reference https://json-spec.readthedocs.io/reference.html
[{ "name": "John", }, { "name" : "Jack", "parent": {"$ref": "#/0"} }, ...]or possibly better with JSON Path syntax http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/
[{ "name": "John", }, { "name" : "Jack", "parent": {"$ref": "$.[?(@.name=='John')]"} }, ...]
You can't. You can specify the path to the parent as a string and evaluate that at runtime, but as JSON is just strings, integers, arrays, and dictionaries, you can't use references.