Converting dynamic element string in JSON into a class

Question

I could not find a question that deals with what I am about to ask so I went ahead and created this question.

I have a json coming back to me from our UI and I can convert that to an object without any issues until I hit this line:

\"lang\":{\"en-US\":{\"name\":\"AS Test Assembly Activity\",\"description\":\"Activity to test assembly activities\"}}

My problem is the "en-US" it appears it would be a class with fields of 'name' and 'description'. How can I safely convert the "en-US" to an object? This can be dynamic and will be whatever the culture code is set too.

I was able to get it converted by changing it to this:

\"lang\":{\"culture\":\"en-US\",\"name\":\"AS Test Assembly Activity\",\"description\":\"Activity to test assembly activities\"}}

But now the UI is stating they could use this, but prefer it to be inline with the original json.

Any thoughts?

Thanks

Edit: (What so I mean 'convert "en-US" to a class?)

when I convert this to a class it should look simliar to this:

public class CustomActivityLanguageData
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }
    public string Culture { get; set; }
}

But the Culture was added for the 'fix' I put in above. On the original json I posted, it looks like "en-US" would be a class in the same way that the 'CustomActivityLanguageData' class in code above is a class (btw 'CustomActivityLanguageData' == 'lang' in json)

It appears "en-US" has fields attached to it, like a class but it won't convert.

Double Edit: To further expound on this, it appears this is what the class would ultimately look like:

public class Lang
{
    en-US cultureCode {get;set;}
}

public class en-US
{
    public string name {get;set;}
    public string description {get;set;}
}

Hope that explains a little better.

As to how you convert it into an object, you simply create the nested Map objects that correspond to the nested JSON "objects". There is no rule saying that a JSON string must be representable as a POC#O with field names matching the JSON object keys. (And there's no need to have such a rule.) — Hot Licks
– Hot Licks, Commented Mar 5, 2014 at 21:40
Ok thank you, didn't realize this. I'll go that route real quick and see what that gives me. — DeepToot
– DeepToot, Commented Mar 6, 2014 at 15:10

gnasher729 · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-05 21:14:53Z

1

You need to realise what you are getting here. You received a dictionary (in JSON, it is called an 'object'). One of the keys in the dictionary is "lang". The value for the "lang" key is itself a dictionary. It could have many keys, probably for different languages, but you received only one key named "en-US". And the value for that key is again a dictionary with two keys "name" and "description".

Normally I would expect that you could receive multiple dictionaries, not just "en-US" but keys for other languages like French or German or Japanese; you would then pick the one that is most appropriate for your application, and extract the "name" and "description" keys from it.

answered Mar 5, 2014 at 21:14

gnasher729

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4 Comments

DeepToot Over a year ago

Thanks for the answer gnasher However, wouldn't a dictionary look like this: \"Arguments\":[{\"ArgumentName\":\"Id\",\"Value\":\"\"}] With the focus being the '[' around it?

Hot Licks Over a year ago

@DeepToot - Nope. There's no rule that there must be an array ([]) inside a dictionary.

DeepToot Over a year ago

Ok, I didn't realize that then. Let me give that a try and see what I come up with.

DeepToot Over a year ago

Thanks for the help HotLicks and @Gnasher729. Making that a dictionary worked as expected.

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