What is the most effective way to parse JSON objects that are dynamically named?

Question

I\'m trying to parse a JSON response that includes something I\'m not quite familiar with, nor have I seen in the wild that often.

Inside one of the JSON ob

Answer 1

Try Json.NET, available as a Nuget package (Newtonsoft.Json) or from http://www.newtonsoft.com/json.

Json.NET can perform class-based serialization/deserialization such as you show. It also provides a generic JObject and JToken classes for cases where the format of the Json is not known or not fixed at dev time.

Here's an example loading a json object from a file.

// load file into a JObject
JObject document;
using (var fileStream = File.OpenRead(someFilePath))
using (var streamReader = new StreamReader(fileStream))
using (var jsonReader = new JsonTextReader(streamReader))
    document = JObject.Load(jsonReader);

// read the JObject
var bugs = (JObject) document["bugs"];
foreach (var bugEntry in bugs)
{
    var bugID = bugEntry.Key;
    var bugData = (JObject) bugEntry.Value;
    var comments = (JArray) bugData["comments"];
    foreach (JObject comment in comments)
        Debug.Print(comment["text"]);
}

Answer 2

Newtonsoft.Json JsonConvert can parse it as a Dictionary<String, Comments> provided with appropriate model classes:

public class Comment
{
    public int id { get; set; }
    public string text { get; set; }
}

public class Comments
{
    public List<Comment> comments { get; set; }
}

public class RootObject
{
    public Dictionary<String, Comments> bugs { get; set; }
}

That can be checked with:

var json = "{\r\n   \"bugs\" : {\r\n      \"12345\" : {\r\n         \"comments\" : [\r\n            {\r\n               \"id\" : 1,\r\n               \"text\" : \"Description 1\"\r\n            },\r\n            {\r\n               \"id\" : 2,\r\n               \"text\" : \"Description 2\"\r\n            }\r\n         ]\r\n      }\r\n   }\r\n}";

Console.WriteLine(json);

var obj = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<RootObject>(json);

Console.WriteLine(obj.bugs["12345"].comments.First().text);