JSON serialization with odd characters

Question

There is an application that was originally written in Ruby on Rails that provides API services to several mobile applications; management has decided to add the functionality of the RoR service to the main .NET-based project. OK, no big deal, we'll just duplicate the service calls in WebAPI right? How difficult can it be?

Apparently somebody on the Ruby side thought it would be a swell idea to put extra characters into the api response objects. I'm seeing things like:

{
    ...
    {"enabled?":true}
    ...
}

...so here I am, shaking my head at this, and hoping there is a technique to serialize .NET objects into JSON where variable names have question marks and whatnot. Is there a way to do this, or are we going to have to build custom serializers for each of these objects? Changing the mobile apps to consume more platform-friendly JSON is really not desirable at this point. We use JSON.Net, but if there's another way to do this, it'd be OK.

dbc · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-21T01:38:01.810

In your c# object, give your property a valid name (such as Enabled in this case) and then specify the JSON property name in the Name property of a DataMember attribute, or the PropertyName property of a JsonProperty attribute:

[DataContract]
public class MyClass
{
    [DataMember(Name="enabled?")]
    public bool Enabled { get; set; }
}

Or

public class MyClass
{
    [JsonProperty("enabled?")]
    public bool Enabled { get; set; }
}

If you use DataMemberAttribute, don't forget to add the DataContract attribute, and that data contract serialization is opt-in, so you'll need to add DataMember to all the attributes you want to serialize. Having done so, however, you'll gain compatibility with the DataContractSerializers, which might be useful down the road.

JSON serialization with odd characters

1 Answers1