Question

I’m building a JSON file parser. I currently use the JavaScriptSerializer class to read the JSON file into a DynamicJsonObject that looks like

dynamic glossaryEntry

Then I can retrieve top level json nodes in the following manner. For retrieving this JSON group called Scoring that looks like

{
    "Scoring":
    [
        {
            "blah": "blah",
            "blah": "blah"      
        },
        {
            "blah": "blah",
            "blah": "blah"      
        }   
    ]
}

I use the dynamic expression:

return glossaryEntry.Scoring;

Or for instance I’d use

return glossaryEntry.quests;

For a JSON that looked like:

{
    "quests":
    [
        ... 
    ]
}

Which is very hardcoded and requires me to know in advance all possible identifiers that can be parsed. I am thinking there must be a way to have that dynamic expression evaluate to something so that the glossaryEntry.”this” part can be determined at runtime?

Thanks for any help you may be able to provide.

Answer 1

You can deserialize your json string to Dictionary<string,object>

var glossaryEntry = new JavaScriptSerializer().Deserialize<Dictionary<string, object>>(json);
var keys = glossaryEntry.Keys.ToList();

var scoring1 = glossaryEntry["Scoring"];
//OR
var scoring2 = glossaryEntry[keys[0]];