Deserialization Issue by Newtonsoft

Question

I want to deserilize this Json to Model, this is the Json: [{"dimensions": [ "www "], "metrics ": [{ "values ": [ "2 " ]},{ "values ": [ "0 "]}]}]

and i create this model to deserialize json to this model:

public class ResultModel
{
    public List<string> dimensions { get; set; }
    public List<Metric> metrics { get; set; }
}

and

public class Metric
{
    public List<string> values { get; set; }
}

and using Newtonsoft for this:

 var model = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<ResultModel>(json);

but it doesnot work and give me this error:

'Cannot deserialize the current JSON array (eg [1,2,3]) into type 'ResultModel' because the type requires a JSON object (eg {"name":"value"}) to deserialize correctly'.

What is the problem?

Answer 1

It's easy to miss that your JSON is really array, even if it contains just one object. So you have to deserialize it to array:

var model = Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<ResultModel[]>(json);

Answer 2

If you're sure that there will be at most one model, you can do:

var model = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<IEnumerable<ResultModel>>(json).FirstOrDefault();

Otherwise, you should deserialize it to a collection of models, as suggested in the comments:

// models is an IEnumerable<ResultModel>
var models = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<IEnumerable<ResultModel>>(json);