Question

From a .NET assembly (non-web app)…

The normal response from Bit.ly is somewhat in the form of below. What is recommended way of consuming that result so that I can easily get the value of the shortUrl field? Since the original URL comes back as a “key”, building a model class to deserialize it to and using LINQ does not seem to make sense. In Javascript, a simple .eval would work but what is the recommended approach in .NET since the model would be dynamic?

{ 
    "errorCode": 0, 
    "errorMessage": "", 
    "results": 
    { 
        "http://www.google.com/": 
        { 
            "hash": "xxxxxx", 
            "shortKeywordUrl": "", 
            "shortUrl": "http://bit.ly/xxxxx", 
            "userHash": "1F5ewS" 
        } 
    }, 
    "statusCode": "OK" 
}

Answer 1

.NET provides a mechanism similar to eval (JavaScriptSerializer). If you just need to parse out a few values the code would look like this:

var serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
var values = serializer.Deserialize<IDictionary<string,object>>( jsonData );
var results = values["results"] as IDictionary<string,object>;
var google = results["http://www.google.com/"] as IDictionary<string,object>;
var shortUrl = results[ "shortUrl" ];

If you’ll be accessing the other data, you can create your own DTO and have the serializer map the JSON data to that.

public class Bitly
{
    public string hash{ get; set; }
    public string shortKeywordUrl{ get; set; }
    public string shortUrl{ get; set; }
    public string userHash{ get; set; }
}

var google = serializer.ConvertToType<Bitly>( results["http://www.google.com/"] );