ServiceStack.Text serializing dictionaries

Question

I was using Json.Net to serialize dictionaries of type Dictionary, and when I added integers or booleans to the dictionary, when deserializing I would get integers and booleans back. Now I was trying to change my code to use ServiceStack.Text instead because of a problem in other part of the code with the serialization of dates, but now I get the booleans an integers as strings after deserialization. Is there any way to have the same behaviour as Json.Net?

Here's the code to reproduce it: https://gist.github.com/1608951 Test_JsonNet passes, but both Test_ServiceStack_Text_TypeSerializer and Test_ServiceStack_Text_JsonSerializer fail

Answer 1

It's a purposeful design decision that no type information is emitted for primitive value types which is why the values are left as strings.

You either have to deserialize into a strong typed POCO that holds the type info:

public class MixType
{
    public string a { get; set; }
    public int b { get; set; }
    public bool c{ get; set; }
}

var mixedMap = new Dictionary<string, object> {
    { "a", "text" },
    { "b", 32 },
    { "c", false },
};

var json = JsonSerializer.SerializeToString(mixedMap);
Console.WriteLine("JSON:\n" + json);

var mixedType = json.FromJson<MixType>();
Assert.AreEqual("text", mixedType.a);
Assert.AreEqual(32, mixedType.b);
Assert.AreEqual(false, mixedType.c);

Or deserialize into a Dictionary<string,string> and parse into specific types yourself.

Or deserialize using ServiceStack's dynamic API. See ServiceStack's Dynamic JSON Test folder for examples on how to do this.

Answer 2

You can now do this:

JsConfig.TryToParsePrimitiveTypeValues = true;

Which will make the JSON deserialiser try to determine what the types should be, and you will get your integers back as integers, booleans back as booleans, etc.