We did something similar to this alexkcd at Mavenlink using our Brainstem gem (you can see an example of the JSON at https://github.com/mavenlink/brainstem http

We did something similar to this alexkcd at Mavenlink using our Brainstem gem (you can see an example of the JSON at https://github.com/mavenlink/brainstem https://github.com/mavenlink/brainstem). We generate a results array that is ordered based on the default order or supplied order. You can easily iterate over that then do direct lookups in the top level keys.