Newtonsoft.Json Deserialize Collection

Question

A third party vendor has a series of endpoints I am consuming, they have the following structure:

[
     {
          "Id" : 117,
          "Name" : "Example"
     },

     {
          "Id" : 118,
          "Name" : "Sample"
     },
]

I created an object structure:

public class RootObject<TType>
{
     public TType[] ApiModels { get; set; }
}

public class Sample
{
     public int Id { get; set; }
     public string Name { get; set; }
}

But when I go to deserialize I do:

JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<RootObject<Sample[]>>(...);

I receive an error cannot deserialize the current JSON array? Why? If I do dynamic I can traverse fine, I assume I'm doing something stupid.

Update Error:

One or more errors occurred. (Cannot deserialize the current JSON array (eg [1,2,3]) into type because the type requires a JSON object (eg {"name":"value"}) to deserialize correctly. To fix this error either change the JSON to a JSON object (eg {"name":"value"}) or change the deserialized type to an array or a type that implements a collection interface (eg ICollection, IList) like List that can be deserialized from a JSON array. JsonArrayAttribute can also be added to the type to force it to deserialize from a JSON array. Path '', line 1, position 1.)

Answer 1

JSON arrays correspond to List<T> in C#, so instead of serialising to RootObject<Sample[]> , you should serialise to List<Sample> :

JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Sample>>(...);

Using RootObject<Sample[]> here is wrong because:

• your JSON's root is an array, not an object
• RootObject<Sample[]> would have a ApiModels property of type Samples[][] , which is obviously not what you want.