Question

I’ve used this useful JQuery function that serializes nested elements. the problem is how to deserialise it using c#.

the following code gives

No parameterless constructor defined for type of ‘System.Collections.Generic.IList`

string json = @"{""root"":{""id"":""main"",""text"":""150px"",""children"":
    [{""id"":""divcls"",""text"":""50px"",""children"":
    [{""id"":""qs1"",""text"":""0px"",""children"":[]}]},
     {""id"":""divcls2"",""text"":""50px"",""children"":[]},
     {""id"":""divcls3"",""text"":""50px"",""children"":[]}]}}";

IList<Commn.main1> objs = new JavaScriptSerializer()
    .Deserialize<IList<Commn.main1>>(json);
string blky = "";

foreach (var item in objs)
{
    blky += item.id;
}
Label1.Text = Convert.ToString(blky);

public class main1
{
    public string id { get; set; }
    public string text { get; set; }
    public sub1 children { get; set; }
}

public class sub1
{
    public string Qid { get; set; }
    public string Qval { get; set; }
}

My Json is only 2 Levels deeep If the solution is recursive how could i know the depth of the element

By the way can a class reference itself like this

public class main1
{
    public string id { get; set; }
    public string text { get; set; }
    public  main1 children { get; set; }
}

Answer 1

First of all, yes a class can reference itself. In your case, you would need to have a main1[] property to represent its children.

public class main1 
{    
    public string id { get; set; } 
    public string text { get; set; }
    public main1[] children { get; set; } 
}

Next, your json string contains not only a main1 object, but also some other object with a “root” property of type main1. It’s perfectly fine, but then you need another class to deserialize into :

public class foo
{
    public main1 root { get; set; }
}

You should then be able to use the Deserialize method to get an instance of foo :

var myFoo = new JavaScriptSerializer().Deserialize<foo>(json);