Json dictionary result deserialization with RestSharp/Newtonsoft.Json.

Question

I am using restsharp and a newtonsoft.json in order to communicate with my Python API.

Communications works fine. Basic queries, which return simple strings are processed, so that's not a problem.

I have problem with deserialization of more complex results and i am doing this for the first time.

So, from web service point of view i am returning following json structure:

{
  "Employee": [
        {
          "Department.DepartmentName": "IT", 
          "Employee.EmployeeArchived": 0, 
          "Employee.EmployeeDepartmentId": 13, 
          "Employee.EmployeeFired": 0, 
          "Employee.EmployeeId": 1, 
          "Employee.EmployeeName": "Name1", 
          "Employee.EmployeePID": 292, 
          "Employee.EmployeeSurname": "Surname1"
    }, 
    {
          "Department.DepartmentName": "IT", 
          "Employee.EmployeeArchived": 0, 
          "Employee.EmployeeDepartmentId": 4, 
          "Employee.EmployeeFired": 0, 
          "Employee.EmployeeId": 2, 
          "Employee.EmployeeName": " Name2", 
          "Employee.EmployeePID": 50, 
          "Employee.EmployeeSurname": " Surname2"
    }
]
}

in response.contents (result of RestClient.Execute) in my C# programm i am getting something like this (i truncated this to just one data row):

{\n  \"Employee\": [\n    {\n      \"Department.DepartmentName\": \"EDV\", \n      \"Employee.EmployeeArchived\": 0, \n      \"Employee.EmployeeDepartmentId\": 13, \n      \"Employee.EmployeeFired\": 0, \n      \"Employee.EmployeeId\": 1, \n      \"Employee.EmployeeName\": \"Name1\", \n      \"Employee.EmployeePID\": 292, \n      \"Employee.EmployeeSurname\": \"Surname1\"\n    }

So far it looks good.

Now. I tried to define my data class to be able to deserialize it as follows:

public class Employee
    {
        [JsonProperty("Department.DepartmentName")]
        public string Department { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("Employee.EmployeeName")]
        public string Name {get; set;}

        [JsonProperty("Employee.EmployeeSurname")]
        public string Surname { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("Employee.EmployeeArchived")]
        public int Archived { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("Employee.EmployeeFired")]
        public int Fired { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("Employee.EmployeeId")]
        public int Id { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("Employee.EmployeeDepartmentId")]
        public int DepId { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("Employee.EmployeePID")]
        public int PID { get; set; }

In addition class contains a constructor, but i assume that's not the problem.

Now, simply calling:

 var Data = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Employee>(response.Content);

... returns a null. I suppose the problem is i return a dictionary "Employee", not just the single data row. How i would need to design it to deserialize this correctly?

Answer 1

Looks like it was simpler than i thought. I renamed "Employee" class to "EmployeeData" (just for sake of elegancy & compatibility with json parameter names).

then i defined second class:

class EmployeeList
    {
        [JsonProperty("Employee")]
        public List<EmployeeData> Employee { get; set; }
    }

And then

JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<EmployeeList>(response.Content);

returns correctly filled class with list of employees. Trivial. Json.net is really powerfull.