Alternative field type in Json.NET

Question

Somebody made a very poor design decision and can deliver me a JSON that has an "exceptional" structure. To simplfy the problem:

{
    "messed-up": "string"
}

{
    "messed-up": { "nested": "value" }
}

Basically a field (very deeply hidden in my case) can be either a string or a more complex object. I need to create such a class structure that would allow me to:

Perform serialization / deserialization
Generate schema

Thus I would need something like this:

public class NotFunny
{
    [JsonProperty("messed-up", NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
    public string messedUp;

    [JsonProperty("messed-up", NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
    public Alternative messedUpAlternative;
}

public class Alternative
{
    [JsonProperty(NullValueHandling = NullValueHandling.Ignore)]
    public string nested;
}

However, for obvious reasons, this cannot work. My question is: how to deal with this sad case?

Any help greatly appreciated!

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

1

You could try to use dynamic type for this purposes.

Sample

My Sample with Newtonsoft.Json:

using Newtonsoft.Json.Linq;

dynamic data1 = JObject.Parse(str1);

if (data1.messed_up is JValue)
    Console.WriteLine(data1.messed_up);

if (data1.messed_up is JObject)
    Console.WriteLine(data1.messed_up.nested);

edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

Community

1
1

answered Nov 07 '15 at 15:58

Boris Sokolov

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I also thought that it might work, unfortunately it doesn't work with schemas. It says "Invalid type. Expected Object, Null but got String". – ebvtrnog Nov 07 '15 at 16:28
1

I'll add one sample in few minutes. Hopefully it could help – Boris Sokolov Nov 07 '15 at 21:55

Alternative field type in Json.NET

1 Answers1