Question

I’ve got this class with a method that returns an object:

public class Deserializer<T>
{
    public static T FromJson(string json)
    {
        return new JavaScriptSerializer().Deserialize<T>(json);
    }   
}

And I’ve got a Type. How do I create an instance of the Deserializer class based on a this type? The following obviously doesn’t work:

var type = typeOf(MyObject);
var foo = Deserializer<type>.FromJson(json);

Answer 1

You could provide a non-generic version as well for consumers that don’t know the type at compile-time (which is a good practice by the way when you are exposing an API):

public class Deserializer
{
    public static T FromJson<T>(string json)
    {
        return new JavaScriptSerializer().Deserialize<T>(json);
    }

    public static object FromJson(string json, Type type)
    {
        return new JavaScriptSerializer().Deserialize(json, type);
    }
}

Now, consumers that know the type at compile-time:

Foo foo = Deserializer.FromJson<Foo>(json);

and consumers that don’t know the type at compile-time:

Type type = ...
object instance = Deserializer.FromJson(json, type);