How do I keep FOR JSON PATH from escaping query results?

Question

I\'m trying to write a fairly complicated SQL Query that produces JSON as the result. All is working great except for some hardcoded arrays I need to have deeper in the hier

Answer 1

I have found one possible solution but I really don't like it. I'm posting what I have in hopes that somebody has a better solution.

Using a WHERE statement on every branch of my UNION with either the affirmative or exact negative of my CASE statement can prevent the "strigifying" of my results.

For example, this query:

SELECT
    'Hi' AS Greeting,
    (
        SELECT * FROM
        (
            SELECT 'asdf' AS Stuff WHERE DatePart(second, GetDate()) % 2 = 0
            UNION ALL
            SELECT 'qwerty' AS Stuff WHERE DatePart(second, GetDate()) % 2 = 1
            UNION ALL
            SELECT 'zxcvb' AS Stuff WHERE DatePart(second, GetDate()) % 2 = 1
        ) AS SubSelect
        FOR JSON PATH
    ) AS Try1
FOR JSON PATH

provides these results:

[
    {
        "Greeting": "Hi",
        "Try1": [
            {
                "Stuff": "qwerty"
            },
            {
                "Stuff": "zxcvb"
            }
        ]
    }
]

If nothing better can be found, I can move forward with this. But this seems like a hacky way to control this.