VRGDG_LoadLatestCombinedJsonText

Somewhere in the VRGameDevGirl pipeline, batches of jobs write their results to combined_*.json files - a record of what the batch produced. VRGDG_LoadLatestCombinedJsonText exists to read the latest one back into the graph as plain text. It's a workflow-automation node: when a batch finishes and you want the next stage to see what it produced (prompts, parameters, file names), this is the clean, graph-native way to load it instead of someone reading a file and typing values back in.

The mechanism is simple and deliberately careful. It picks the latest combined JSON for your chosen batch_type (resolving to the newest file, auto-selecting "latest" when you want it), reads it, and re-serializes the JSON with indentation - or returns the raw text if it isn't valid JSON. It also handles the UTF-8 BOM case, which is a small detail but a real one: Windows-written JSON files often carry a BOM that trips naive parsers.

The inputs that matter

• batch_type - Text2Image or Image2Video. Tells it which batch's combined JSON you want.
• combined_json_file - a dropdown of the files found (or <no files found> if there are none). Choose one, or rely on the "latest" auto-resolution.
• refresh - an INT you bump to force re-reading the file. Because ComfyUI caches nodes by their inputs, a node reading a file can return stale content; this is the "please re-read" knob. The node's change-detection actually checks the file's modification time too, so it re-runs when the file changes even if you don't touch refresh.

Output: text - the JSON content as a STRING. Wire it into a text node, an LLM, or whatever consumes batch results.

Install

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/vrgamegirl19/comfyui-vrgamedevgirl

Or search vrgamedev in ComfyUI Manager. No special dependencies.

Common issues

• Shows <no files found>: no combined JSON exists for that batch_type yet - the batch has to run first, or the file lives somewhere the pack's file browser isn't scanning.
• Stale content after a new batch: bump refresh to force a re-read. The node does watch file mtime, but if the file was overwritten in-place with identical metadata, refresh is your override.
• Ugly JSON output: it pretty-prints with indentation by design; if you need compact JSON for a downstream consumer, that's a transform on the text output.

Honest take: this is a plumbing node with a narrow job - it only makes sense inside the pack's batch-based workflow, where combined JSON files are a real artifact. But if you're automating that workflow (and especially if you want the next stage to react to what a batch produced), it beats reading files by hand, and the mtime-aware re-run means you can leave it in the graph and it just updates.