Deserializing a List of Objects that contain a Dictionary

Question

I\'ve seen a lot of examples that seem to indicate that what I\'m doing should work, but for whatever reason, it doesn\'t. I\'m trying to deserialize a collection of objects

Answer 1

Looks like Dictionary is not serializable the way you'd expect. I tried List> instead, and that doesn't seem to work either.

Only thing I can think of is some ugly stuff that will convert your JSON into a custom type, and then convert it into a dictionary. So using your 2nd JSON example exactly as-is, you can do something like:

// Inside of MyObject class
[DataMember]
public Kvp[] Dictionary { get; set; }

public Dictionary GetDictionary()
{
    return Dictionary.ToDictionary(x => x.Key, x => x.Value);
}

//////////////////

public class Kvp
{
    public T1 Key { get; set; }
    public T2 Value { get; set; }
}

Dictionary myDictionary = myObjects[0].GetDictionary();

I'm sure there's a much better way, but this should at least work.