Is there any type of value that can hold dictionaries or tables?

[dumbprogrammer69 (kielownsme)]

Something like an IntValue contains an integer value, but are there any values that can store dictionaries or tables? If not, are there any way to store a table in a way that different LocalScripts can access and do changes to the table? Somebody suggested that I should JSONEncode the table then store it inside a StringValue then just JSONDecode it at the time of use, but I will not be storing strings nor numbers in the table. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[SeargentAUS (Seargent)]

There isn’t a specific object that can hold them. If you don’t wnat to use JSONEncode and JSONDecode, then you basically have 2 options:

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You can attempt to store it as a global variable, using _G. However, this is generally not adviced due to the potential overwriting of the values stored their by Core scripts, and is also (apparently) not very performant.

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You could store the dictionary / table as a collection of ObjectValues, instead of as a single one. Below is some code that I spent far too long on creating that achieves this. The decoding of it is left as an exercise to the viewer (I can’t be bothered)

Code

local Output = game.Workspace
local Array = {"Hello", 123, game.Workspace, ["Bob"] = {5, 2, 3, ["aaaaa"] = "b", ["aagsio"] = 5}}

local function Recursive(data, parent, key) 
	local Holder
	local create = Instance.new -- Just because it gets too messy. 
										 -- You can replace all occurances of create with Instance.new if you prefer
	
	if typeof(data) == "table" then
		Holder = Instance.new("Folder", parent)
		Holder.Name = key
		for key, val in pairs(data) do
			Recursive(val, Holder, key)
		end      
		return
	elseif typeof(data) == "Vector3" then
		Holder = create("Vector3Value")
		
	elseif typeof(data) == "Color3" then
		Holder = create("Color3Value")
		
	elseif typeof(data) == "string" then
		Holder = create("StringValue")
		
	elseif typeof(data) == "number" then
		Holder = create("IntValue")
		
	elseif typeof(data) == "Instance" then
		Holder = create("ObjectValue")
		
	else
		warn("Missing data type for", data)
		return 
	end
	Holder.Name = key
	Holder.Parent = parent
	Holder.Value = data
end

Recursive(Array, Output, 'Dictionary')