CLR Object And JSON Serialization And Deserialization

Introduction

This article demonstrates how to serialize and deserialize CLR objects for web-based applications. This article starts with an introduction to the System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer class. After that, a small code snippet is given for it and where exactly this approach fits into the web-based application

System.Object
System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer

Namespace

System.Web.Script.Serialization

Assembly

System.Web.Extensions (in System.Web.Extensions.dll)

Provides serialization and deserialization functionality for AJAX-enabled applications.

Creating CLR object

A plain CLS object, which has a few classes, attributes, and necessary methods as shown below,

class Person {
    public string firstName, lastName, Designation;
    public ushort age;
    public string[] technologies;
    public Address personAddress;
    public override string ToString() {
        base.ToString();
        return string.Format(@ "Name: {0} {1}
            Designation: {
                2
            }
            Age: {
                3
            }
            Skills: {
                4
            }
            Address: {
                5
            } {
                6
            }, {
                7
            }
            ",
            this.firstName, this.lastName, this.Designation, this.age, string.Join(",", this.technologies), this.personAddress.addressLine, this.personAddress.city, this.personAddress.country);
    }
}
class Address {
    public string addressLine, city, country;
}

Initiating and printing the CLR object to the console,

Person I = new Person();
I.firstName = "Adil";
I.lastName = "Ansari";
I.Designation = "Consultant";
I.age = 25;
Address personAddres = new Address() {
    addressLine = "Vikhroli LBS West",
        city = "Mumbai", country = "IN"
};
I.personAddress = personAddres;
I.technologies = new string[] {
    ".Net",
    "SQL",
    "SharePoint"
};
// Entity to string
Console.WriteLine("Entity:" + Environment.NewLine + I);
Console.ReadLine();

Output to the console

Serialization and Deserialization

Now to serialize and deserialize the CLR and JSON, a class JavaScriptSerializer needs to be initiated and its instance method will be used to do so, as listed below:

• public string Serialize(Object obj)
  Converts an object to a JSON string.

• public T Deserialize<T>(string input)
  Converts the specified JSON string to an object of type T.

  JavaScriptSerializer jsSerializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
  string serializedPerson = jsSerializer.Serialize(I);
  // Serialized entity string 
  Console.WriteLine("Entity to JSON:" + Environment.NewLine + serializedPerson);

  // Deserialized entity back to CLR object
  Person Same = jsSerializer.Deserialize < Person > (serializedPerson);
  Console.WriteLine("Back to Entity:" + Environment.NewLine + Same);

Summary

In this article, I discussed how to serialize and deserialize a CLR object to and from JSON using C# with an example. Instead of using any third-party DLLs for this purpose, we can have the native .Net capabilities available to us.

Reference

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.script.serialization.javascriptserializer.aspx