Question

I’m currently working with the Facebook API in c#, using the NewtonSoft JSON library to consume all the returned API data.

Returning a list of user pages I find myself creating one off classes for attributes within the returned JSON, in order to serialize it.

Right now I have this:

    public class FacebookPage
    {
        public string id { get; set; }
        public string name { get; set; }
        public string link { get; set; }
        public string category { get; set; }
        public bool is_published { get; set; }
        public bool can_post { get; set; }
        public int likes { get; set; }
        public FacebookPageLocation location { get; set; }
        public string phone { get; set; }
        public int checkins { get; set; }
        public string picture { get; set; }
        public FacebookPageCover cover { get; set; }
        public string website { get; set; }
        public int talking_about_count { get; set; }
        public string access_token { get; set; }
    }
    public class FacebookPageLocation
    {
        public decimal latitude { get; set; }
        public decimal longitude { get; set; }
    }
    public class FacebookPageCover
    {
        public string cover_id { get; set; }
        public string source { get; set; }
        public int offset_y { get; set; }
    }

It seems like there must be a better way to do this. I can replace FacebookPageLocation with Dictionary, but how would I go about replacing FacebookCoverPage?

Ideally, I’d love to be able to declare it in a nice nested format, like this

    public class FacebookPage
    {
        id = string,
        name = string.
        link = string,
        category = string,
        is_published = bool,
        can_post = bool,
        likes = int,
        location = 
        {
            latitude = decimal,
            longtitude = decimal
        },
        phone = string,
        checkins = int,
        picture = string,
        cover  = 
        {
            cover_id = string,
            source = string,
            offset_y = int
        }
        website = string,
        talking_about_count = int,
        access_token = string
    }

I realise this won’t work in practice, but is there anything that just makes declaring these kinds of classes neater? Or unnecessary?

Answer 1

Instead of declaring a lot classes, i would use dynamic. For the sample json below

{
  "name": "joe",
  "id": 1151,
  "location": {
    "lat": 180.0,
    "lng": -180.0
  }
}

–

code would be

dynamic obj = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(json);
Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} {2}", obj.id, obj.name, obj.location.lat);