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c#jsonjson.net
Mrinal Kamboj
Mrinal Kamboj

Reputation: 11482

How to modify the name of a class when serializing it to JSON

I have an entity class as shown below. I am using Json.Net to serialize it to JSON. Now there are couple of fields / properties in the class which need to be serialized with different names from the actual properties, and that is easily achievable using the [JsonProperty] attribute as shown in the code below. But what if I need to change the name of the main entity itself, which is marked with the [JsonObject] attribute? (Here I am talking about the UserDashboards class which is derived from EntityBase<int>.) I have tried adding a few named parameters like title, id, etc. but they did not help.

     [JsonObject]
     public class UserDashboards : EntityBase<int>
     {  
        public int UserID { get; set; }
        public int DashboardID { get; set; }
        public int DashboardSequence { get; set; }
        public string DashboardTitle { get; set; }
        public int PermissionLevelID { get; set; }
        [JsonProperty("IsHome")]
        public Nullable<bool> IsHomeDashboard { get; set; }
        [JsonProperty("IsShared")]
        public Nullable<bool> IsSharedDashboard { get; set; }             
      }

Upvotes: 1

Views: 5488

Answers (1)

Brian Rogers
Brian Rogers

Reputation: 129667

If your object is at the root level in the JSON, it cannot be assigned a name. Objects in JSON actually do not have names, per the specification (see JSON.org). Object properties have names. So if you effectively want to name your object in the JSON, you will need to wrap it in another object. Then you can assign a name to that property in the wrapper object. Like so:

class Wrapper
{
    [JsonProperty("UserData")]
    public UserDashboards UserDashboards { get; set; }
}

If you then serialize the wrapper object then you will end up with JSON like this:

{
    "UserData" :
    {
        "UserID" : 42,
        "DashboardID" : 26,
        "DashboardSequence" : 1,
        "DashboardTitle" : "Foo",
        "PermissionLevelID" : 99,
        "IsHome" : true,
        "IsShared" : false
    }
}

Upvotes: 6

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