JSON.Net deserialize object containing xml

Question

I have a JSON object with a specific field whose value is always XML, as follows:

{
    ...
    "XmlValue": "<tag1><etc></etc></tag1>"
    ...
}

I'm using JSON.Net as the deserializer. I want to make this deserialize to a class like this:

public class ObjectContainingXml
{
    ...
    public XElement XmlValue { get;set; }
    ...
}

When I try, using JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<ObjectContainingXml>(input) , I get this exception: XmlNodeConverter can only convert JSON that begins with an object.

Is there a way to make this natively work in JSON.Net without treating that field as a string and then parsing the field to XML manually?

Answer 1

There's currently no built-in way to perform that kind of deserialization with JSON.Net.

Background:

XmlNodeConverter is meant to serialize XML as JSON. For example, a node like

<root><p>Text1<span>Span1</span> <span>Span2</span> Text2</p></root>

will be serialized as

{"root":{"p":{"#text":["Text1"," Text2"],"span":["Span1","Span2"]}}}

If you need XML to be serialized to string and back, you'll need to implement a custom JsonConverter .