Are you absolutely committed to relying on JSON objects preserving order? If your design mandates that to be the case, you would be better off making your filtered element contain an array of objects rather than object elements. This is a problem that my be solved by one level of indirection.

If there is any possibility that you can annul your marriage to a design that requires ordered JSON objects, I think you should give that possibility due consideration.

Here are a few reasons why:

• Wikipedia: Object: an unordered collection of name/value pairs...
• JSON.org states, "An object is an unordered set of name/value pairs."
• The ECMA standard is silent on defining object ordering, but is explicit in asserting that arrays are ordered.
• RFC4627 does not define how objects are to be ordered, and therefore makes no guarantees. It does, however, mandate that a JSON parser MUST accept all texts that conform to the JSON grammar. It stands to reason, then, that all conforming JSON parsers do not need to be sensitive to object ordering.
• RFC7159 again omits any guarantees about object order, and goes so far as to include this advice:

  "JSON parsing libraries have been observed to differ as to whether or not they make the ordering of object members visible to calling software. Implementations whose behavior does not depend on member ordering will be interoperable in the sense that they will not be affected by these differences.

Perl's hashes have a high degree of parity with JSON objects. Standard Perl hashes do not maintain any concept of static order. You can tie a Perl hash to a class that maintains order, but in doing so you make tradeoffs, giving away speed and memory for reliable ordering. Is it worth the tradeoff? If so, you may need to also rethink the serialization format you are using, because JSON isn't guaranteed to serialize and deserialize objects in any particular order. Any guarantees would have to come from the implementation. As an example, JSON parsers such as JSON::XS allow you to specify canonical ordering for object keys. But canonical is used to mean a sorted order. Not a user-specified order.