How can I have a Select in Nova that lets me store JSON in the database?

If I correctly understand what you're trying to accomplish, you could do something along those lines, but you're not stating if your JSON strings are dynamic (coming from database and can vary) or hardcoded. We also have no idea about what your database structure looks like, so it's kinda hard to help you there. The following example takes into account that your values are hard coded.

public function fields(Request $request)
{
    return [
        Select::make('Reference')->options([
            "{ name: 'Google' }" => "Google",
            "{ name: 'Press' }" => "Press",
            "{ name: 'Linkedin' }" => "Linkedin",
            "{ name: 'Facebook' }" => "Facebook",
            "{ name: 'Twitter' }" => "Twitter",
            "{ name: 'Advert' }" => "Advert",
            "{ name: 'Paradigm' }" => "Paradigm",
            "{ name: 'Referral' }" => "Referral",
            "{ name: 'Shares Magazine' }" => "Shares Magazine",
            "{ name: 'British Investor Summit' }" => "British Investor Summit"
        ])->displayUsingLabels();
    ];
}

Once again, if you want something dynamic, tell us more about your database structure and what behavior you expect.

Most of my selects are static, but some are dynamic, like the country selector.

@piljac1 by the way, this is storing it in my database as "{ name: 'Press' }" , correct would be {"name": "Press"}

That's my bad. What about if you format the keys correctly, does it work ?

@piljac1 Nope. It adds slashes which I don’t want. I tried escaping slashes but even then same. I tried that it with json encode.

What if you format your string in a proper JSON string within an observer matching your model ? That's the suggested Nova way to add an additional processing layer before actually interacting with the database itself.

You could use some kind of HTML legal markdown logic and interpret it afterwards (convert it to actual JSON)

@piljac1 good one. I already do have model events. Not sure you mean specific to nova ? Could get messy. Any other ideas ?

I don't know what you mean by messy because it is the suggested way:

Therefore, it is easy to listen for model events triggered by Nova and react to them. The easiest approach is to simply attach a model observer to a model

You can also set an observer to only be active within Nova (see the doc)

@piljac1 thank you. I already do have model events for creating and saved so I guess nova is already triggering those. Except from what I understand you are suggesting stacking up a nova specific one ?

@piljac1 Also, wont having 2 saving model events listen to a change conflict or collide?

For sure it would need to be a Nova specific one to avoid that processing on the front-end, but will the two observers collide ? Well not on the front-end since you're registering one of the two in Nova's service provider only. But about Nova itself, I'd need to test it, because I never had that situation happen. As a side question, is your already in place observer required to run in Nova also ?

@piljac1 So I implemented a Nova::serving and put in a UserObserver inside it. So far it is not colliding, as I am running a piece of code specific to Nova only. Do you know the sequence these run, that is, which event gets fired first? Nova observer event or the one setup in my dispatchEvents within the model?

I don't know the sequence since I never used the $dispatchEvents way. The easiest way would be to call the dd function in both to determine in which order they're executed.