reading my json response from a post request i sent

Question

I made a post request class that I could re-use to make POST requests to an external api and return the objects they send me (JSON):

class PostRequest
    {
             


        

Answer 1

To get the response data you need to call GetResponseStream() on the HttpWebResponse object and then read from the stream. Something like this:

using (Stream s = response.GetResponseStream())
{
    using (TextReader textReader = new StreamReader(s, true))
    {
        jsonString = textReader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

To get the data from the json string, you need to create a data contract class to describe the json data exactly like this:

    [DataContract]
    public class ApiData
    {
        [DataMember(Name = "name")]  <--this name must be the exact name of the json key
        public string Name { get; set; }

        [DataMember(Name = "description")]
        public string Description { get; set; }
    }

Next you can deserialize the json object from the string:

        using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(jsonString)))
        {
            DataContractJsonSerializer serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(ApiData));
            ApiData obj = (ApiData)serializer.ReadObject(stream);
            return obj;
        }

WebRequest will work fine, but I would recommend installing the NuGet package for the HttpClient class. It makes life much simpler. for instance, you could make the above request code in just a few lines:

        HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient();
        HttpRequestMessage msg = new HttpRequestMessage(new HttpMethod("POST"), escapedUrl);
        HttpResponseMessage response = await httpClient.SendAsync(msg);

In answer to you question below, here is the generic json converter code that I use:

public static class JsonHelper
{
    public static T Deserialize(string json)
    {
        using (MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json)))
        {
            DataContractJsonSerializer serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(T));
            T obj = (T)serializer.ReadObject(stream);
            return obj;
        }
    }

    public static string Serialize(object objectToSerialize)
    {
        using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
        {
            DataContractJsonSerializer serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(objectToSerialize.GetType());
            serializer.WriteObject(ms, objectToSerialize);
            ms.Position = 0;
            using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(ms))
            {
                return sr.ReadToEnd();
            }
        }
    }
}