Question

I’m working on my own small Twitter application in C#.
I’ve managed to serialize the json data from https://api.twitter.com/1/followers/ids.json?cursor=-1&screen_name=
It returns something like this:

{ "ids" : [ 401295021,
  506271294,
  14405250,
  25873220
],
"next_cursor" : 0,
"next_cursor_str" : "0",
"previous_cursor" : 0,
"previous_cursor_str" : "0"
}

Using this class I can serialize it:

    [DataContract]
    public class TwitterFollowers
    {
        [DataMember(Name = "ids")]
        public IList<int> AccountIDs { get; set; }
    }

Now I want to get the screen names of the followers so I use this url:
http://api.twitter.com/1/users/lookup.json?user_id=

This json looks like this:

[ { "contributors_enabled" : false,
"created_at" : "Wed Apr 16 06:30:52 +0000 2008",
"default_profile" : false,
"default_profile_image" : false,
"description" : "",
"utc_offset" : -25200,
"verified" : false
},
{ "contributors_enabled" : false,
"created_at" : "Tue Mar 04 12:31:57 +0000 2008",
"default_profile" : true,
"default_profile_image" : false,
"description" : "",
"utc_offset" : 3600,
"verified" : false
}
]

As you can see the array starts right away, without naming it.
How should my class look like to serialize this?

I’ve tried this, but that doesn’t work:

    [DataContract]
    public class TwitterProfiles
    {
        [DataMember(Name = "")]
        public IList<TwitterProfile> Profiles { get; set; }
    }

    [DataContract]
    public class TwitterProfile
    {
        [DataMember(Name = "lang")]
        public string Language { get; set; }

        [DataMember(Name = "location")]
        public string Location { get; set; }

        [DataMember(Name = "name")]
        public string Name { get; set; }

        [DataMember(Name = "screen_name")]
        public string ScreenName { get; set; }

        [DataMember(Name = "url")]
        public string URL { get; set; }
    }

Answer 1

Have you tried removing the “Name” property off of the DataMember attribute all together? Meaning:

[DataMember]
public IList<TwitterProfile> Profiles { get; set; }

If that doesn’t work, one option you could also do is grab the output from the api call, and format it into a json string that you know you can deserialize:

string.Format("{{\"profiles\":{0}}}", GetJsonResponse())