Generating data to match JSON schema with JSON.NET

Question

I'm sort of a beginner with Json.NET. I've gotten pretty good at serializing and deserializing typical objects using JsonConvert, but not much more than that. So this might be a stupid question.

My program receives a JSON schema from a REST server. I use this schema to generate the UI where the user can fill in data. Then I need to package up the user data and send it back to the REST server. This data must match the original schema. I haven't quite figured out how to serialize my data into a format that would be considered valid by the schema I originally received.

Thanks in advance, and apologies if this is a dumb question.

Update :

The schema could change at any time and I'd need to be able to handle that on the fly, so a concrete class implementation is out of the question.

Answer 1

After more digging and talking to the guy running the REST server, apparently I was making this way more difficult than it needed to be.

In the end, all I needed was a dictionary of key/value pairs, the key being the property name and the value being some data of the type specified in the schema. Luckily, Json.NET converts those into JSON perfectly.

Answer 2

If the schema could change and you don't want to modify the class and compile the code every time it does you can use dynamic/ExpandoObject .

Serialization example:

dynamic foo = new ExpandoObject();
foo.Bar = "something";
string json = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject(foo);

Deserialization example:

dynamic foo = JObject.Parse(jsonText);
string bar = foo.Bar; // bar = "something"