What is the difference between these 2 JSON formats?

Question

I have the following simple class:

public class Test
{
    public string property1 { get; set; }
    public string property2 { get; set; }
}

When I try to serialize it into JSON using:

Test t = new Test() { property1 = "p1", property2 = "p2" };
var serializedData = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(t, Formatting.None);

I get JSON that looks like the following:

This will come across as null when I try to submit it to a WEB API app. I am using the application/json in the content header.

If I instead submit the same class starting off as a string, it works fine:

string test = "{\"property1\":\"p1\",\"property2\":\"p2\"}";
var serializedData = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(test, Formatting.None);

But it looks like this in the Visualizer:

If I paste both strings into Notepad, they look exactly the same.

Any ideas why the class serialization doesn't work?

Answer 1

The JSON serialization works fine. In the first case when you're serializing the object it returns you normal JSON:

{
    "property1": "p1",
    "property2": "p2"
}

In the second case you have already serialized the JSON by hand and you're trying to serialize it second time which is resulting in a new JSON containing a JSON itself as single value or more likely single key:

{ "{\"property1\":\"p1\",\"property2\":\"p2\"}" }

You can test that the second string is already serialized by running this code:

var serializedData2 = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(test);

And it should return you the key-values of the JSON:

{
    "property1": "p1",
    "property2": "p2"
}

I guess the null value is coming from somewhere else.