Deserialize JSON with dynamic objects

Question

I have a JSON object that comes with a long list of area codes. Unfortunately each area code is the object name on a list in the Data object. How do I create a class that will allow RestSharp to deserialize the content?

Here's how my class looks now:

public class phaxioResponse
{
    public string success { get; set; }
    public string message { get; set; }
    public List<areaCode> data { get; set; }

    public class areaCode
    {
        public string city { get; set; }
        public string state { get; set; }
    }
}

And here's the JSON content:

{
    success: true
    message: "277 area codes available."
    data: {
        201: {
            city: "Bayonne, Jersey City, Union City"
            state: "New Jersey"
        }
        202: {
            city: "Washington"
        state: "District Of Columbia"
        } [...]
}

Answer 1

I don't know anything about RestSharp, but if you're using Newtonsoft on the server side, then you can just pass a JObject to your method. Then you can interrogate the object to see what type of object it really is and use JObject.ToObject() to convert it.

Answer 2

Since this JSON is not C# friendly, I had to do a little bit of hackery to make it come out properly. However, the result is quite nice.

var json = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(sampleJson);
var data = ((JObject)json.data).Children();
var stuff = data.Select(x => new { AreaCode = x.Path.Split('.')[1], City = x.First()["city"], State = x.Last()["state"] });

This code will generate an anonymous type that best represents the data. However, the anonymous type could be easily replaced by a ctor for a more normal DTO class.

The output looks something like this: