Working with JSON on the Server-Side in ASP.NET and C#

Question

I have an ASP.NET web form that is using JQuery on the client-side. I have a user interface that is building a collection of objects and storing them in JSON. With my client

Answer 1

How you send it to the server is up to you - a hidden field, an AJAX call, whatever you prefer. Once you've got the string on the server, you'll need 2 things:

1. A C# server-side representation of that object
2. A converter to go from JSON to that C# representation.

Let's adjust your example a bit, because "myCollection" in your example is an object, not a collection. So we'll call it myObject. Secondly, we'll assume that "data" is an array of strings. It could be anything, but we'll keep it simple.

var myObject = {
  data: ["string1","string2"]
};

We'll also assume you're using the DataContractJsonSerializer, so you can easily map the two different case-styles...JavaScript is typically camelCase, and C# is typically ProperCase. So, in C#, this would be:

[DataContract(Name="myObjectType")]
public class MyObjectType{
  [DataMember(Name="data")]
  public string[] Data { get; set; }
}

Now you have two representations of the same structure, one in c#, one in JavaScript. To convert from one to the other, we can use the built-in DataContractJsonSerializer, like this:

public static T Deserialize<T>(string json)
{
    using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(json)))
    {
      DataContractJsonSerializer serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(T));
      return (T)serializer.ReadObject(ms);
    }
}

...resulting in a final call of:

MyObjectType myObject = Deserialize<MyObjectType>(incomingString);

Answer 2

JSON in the Hidden Field is a valid way to do it, as the data would then be posted to the server. You could then use the System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer component to deserialize the data (to a dictionary) and access the data that way. Not 100% sure hhow array data comes out of that process. THere are also other tools like JSON.NET too to parse JSON.

Another way is via a web service call, but that doesn't go through the page lifecycle.

HTH.