Hello, this is Jose Luis here at
ParametricCamp. And welcome to another video in our coding jam
series, where what I would like to teach you is how to serialize
and deserialize JSON data using the C sharp programming
language. And what do I mean by that? Well, you've probably
encountered something like this in your life, this is a file
that has some data that is using the JSON structure to represent
key value pairs. Turns out that this kind of format is one of
the most popular formats for data exchange in the internet,
with for HTTP request as data exchange and applications. And
it turns out that C sharp is actually pretty good at
importing and importing this kind of data. So what I would
like to teach you in this video is how to take for example, data
that is saved in a file as a JSON file in your system, how to
read that file and turn it into an object that you can retrieve
particular properties from. And then also how once we have an
object that lives in C Sharp, and that where we can manipulate
the properties, how to turn that how to turn that object into a
JSON representation as a string, in case we need to send it as an
HTTP request, or we need to save it as a file, etc, etc. This is
going to be perhaps one of the most useful and practical videos
that I've done in many, many videos in this channel. But it's
going to be definitely super helpful for you as well, because
you're going to encounter JSON data in your programming life,
for sure to 100% Guaranteed. Okay, let's take a look at how
to do this in C Sharp. Alright, so let's start with the
basics. What are we going to be doing in this video in this
video, I would like to teach you how to D serialize. JSON data.
And what is JSON data. JSON stands for JavaScript Object
Notation, and is basically a way of organizing data that makes it
very easy for machines to read and write. So if you remember
from previous videos, where I was showing you how to de
serialize and parse CSV data, comma separated values, there's
actually a link to the video popping up in the corner of this
screen. This is just an alternative way that is perhaps
a bit more flexible and less tabulated. So if you ever have a
JSON file, or JSON file, or the JSON data structure is going to
look something like this, it's going to have some open and
closing curlies. And it's going to have basically, a set of key
value pairs is going to have the key that is the name of the
property. And that is going to be the value of that property,
the key is always going to be a string. And the property, or the
value is always going to be something of the basic primitive
types that are available in C Sharp and in other programming
languages. Like for example, a string, or it could be a
Boolean, or it could be an integer, or it could be a
double, or it can also be other arrays of data, or it can also
be other JSON objects themselves. Okay. So it's a bit
more, it's a bit richer data structure. And it turns out that
JSON data is one of the most popular formats these days for
exchanging information, especially if you're working
with data that is going into or that is coming from the
internet, and from API's application programming
interfaces. So knowing how to read JSON data and incorporate
it into our C sharp programs, or knowing how to take some data
that we have in C Sharp and generating a JSON representation
of that data object and sending it somewhere to an API call or
whatever turns out to be really, really useful. So what I would
like to teach you in this video is how having JSON data how to
turn it into a C sharp object, or vice versa. So that will be
serializing, or deserializing information. The way we're going
to do that is I'm going to start a Visual Studio intense
instance. And I'm going to create a very simple project
called JSON testing, I'm going to be using the dotnet framework
because a lot of the work that I do also integrate into software
integrated software that uses the dotnet framework. But you're
welcome. If you're a bit more modern, or you're watching this
from the future, you're welcome to use the dotnet core dotnet
standard, whatever you want to do, okay, so I'm going to create
this console application called JSON serialization, see real
life session. Okay, I'm going to place it on my desktop, and then
I'm going to have this simple console application. Alright. So
you've seen how I have this JSON file in my file system, but for
the for starters to make it a bit easier. I'm just going to
copy paste this JSON string that has basically a data structure
representing some kind of person or some kind of YouTuber named Leave me. So there's going to be
my name, my channel, whether if I'm doing this or not, etc, etc,
okay, and then I'm going to console write this, I'm going to
dump it on the console. And I'm going to pause the execution of
these console application. And I'm going to see if this works.
So I'm going to crank this. And this works. And I'm getting
right now a dump of this JSON data structure in the form of a
string, and I'm posting it into the console. Okay, beautiful.
But as you may or may not have noticed, this is actually a
fairly complicated string. It has a lot of like curly
brackets, apostrophes, double quotes, square brackets, etc,
etc. So cherry picking from this entire data struck, and this is
actually a very simple one. But cherry picking from this day
entire data structure, the objects that I may need, like my
name, or my channel, etc, could be tedious by just doing string
manipulation. So that's why there are tools that help us to
take something that is in JSON format, and D serialize it into
an object that we can cleanly use an exchange and vice versa.
Okay. So let me show you what that looks like. At the time of this recording,
the dotnet framework doesn't have very streamline or very
elegant ways of dealing with JSON files. So one of the most
popular tools at the time of this recording for Jason's D
serialization is actually this library from Newton soft called
JSON dotnet. This is kind of the standard these days that people
use. But if you're in the future, and using the.net core,
or dotnet, flat dotnet, some of these tools are already embedded
in that framer, I will explain that in a second. So the way
this works is that we're going to be importing the dot the
json.net library into our project. And then we're going to
be doing this thing, which is called Creating a schema of the
data that we want to D serialize. What that means is
that, what we're going to be doing is basically create a
class that represents a template for the data that we expect to
deserialize. And hopefully, the data that we have, will match
that template for an object and then designing that template and
then using the JSON convert class of the library to
deserialize. This object will make it very, very simple. Okay,
so the first thing we're going to do is, because we are in the
dotnet framework, we are going to bring in the Newton soft dot
JSON library for the serialization. The way I'm going
to do that is I'm going to right click on my project, I'm going
to go to Manage nougat packages, I'm going to go to Browse, and
here I'm going to type new Tom soft. And you can see that the
first thing that pops up is this library that has 3.2 billion
downloads, which means that it's kind of popular, I'd still these
days, right, so I'm going to install this nougat package in
my project correct. And then I'm going to go to the beginning,
and I'm going to say using Newton soft dot j s, alright.
Now, if you're watching this from the future, and you're
using dotnet, or dotnet standard, or you're just simply
not into dotnet framework, then my understanding is that you
might be able to use system dot text dot JSON, which is
available in non dotnet frameworks, okay? For non dotnet
framework. However, because I am in dotnet framework, that's
where we are this video, we're going to be using the Newton
soft version, but I believe that actually both are almost almost
identical. And then you could be switching between the two with
no problem. All right. So with this, you're going to see how
easy this is going to be. So I have this string representation
of an object that is something that has a name, a channel,
active age, and some members. So I think this may be I could
basically represent it with some kind of template that I'm going
to call YouTube. Alright. And so what I'm going to do is I'm
going to define an internal class that is going to live in
parallel here with me. So I'm going to say here, I'm going to
save public class and I'm going to define a class that is going
to be the template that all this information is going to adhere
to. I'm going to call this YouTuber, for example, open and
close curly. And what I would like to do now is I would like
to define properties with their data types that match what I
expect from my JSON data. So for example, this is going to be For example, a string called
name, and I need to be very careful so that this property
name matches the property that I expect in, in the JSON file
exactly, including the casing, I believe, right. So for example,
here, I would like to say public string is going to be channel
also, it needs to match real well, then for active, this is
going to be a public, public Boolean, and then I'm going to
call active public and for the age is probably going to be an
integer, because, you know, sorry, because I will never
define HS 2.3. That's not kind of a thing. And then, for our
members, because this is going to be an array of strings,
something that I can do is I can say, well, I'm going to define
this as a list of strings. I have a list of string, I'm
going this going to call members, you probably also could
use an array. But lists are just very handy in in C Sharp. And
then once I have defined the template for the data structure
that is going to come from this JSON object, then it's just
going to be really, really easy. So I'm going to remove this. And
I'm going to say I'm going to declare a variable called the
serialized. And that's going to be and you see, autocomplete, Visual Studio is
much smarter than me. So the autocomplete already gave me
everything that I need to do. So JSON convert is basically a
static class that leaves as part of the Newton soft package.
Alright, and I'm going to write this manually. And then from
that, I can just ask for the serialization method. So can I
be serialized a particular object, and what I can do is I
can force that object to be of a particular type. So because I
have already fine YouTuber, I can say, can you deserialize,
the object that I'm going to give you make sure that is going
to be of the type of the template that I generated
YouTuber, and then in parentheses, I want to give it
this stream that has that JSON data. So that's going to be the
JSON that I got from there. Alright. So I did declare this
as an implicit variable with bar, but technically, the return
of this object is going to be something that is going to be of
the type YouTuber, so it's an variable of this type. So
hopefully, after this works, so what I can do is I can start
printing things. So for example, the serialized name, I can print
out the serialized channel, the serialized, active and the
serialized dot age. And then for each for each variable member in
this, you can see that the serialized
dot members, I can also print member, member, member, and then member, all right. So if I run
this, hopefully, this is going to work. And you can see that
indeed, from my object, I'm already
printing, the name, the channel, the active the h, and then each
one of the members that are part of our beautiful ParametricCamp
community. Okay, fantastic. So this would be an
example of D serialization, or from a string representation of
a JSON file, how to turn it into a C sharp, fully fledged object.
Alright. Now, what if I wanted to take
this YouTuber, and I needed to send it as a JSON file somewhere
to an API request, etc? How would I do that? The process now
that we have the entire thing is actually super, super simple.
Look at this, the only thing that I need to do now is I need
to say, I'm going to create a string variable, because Jason's
are basically strings at the end of the day that I'm going to
call C re Leist. All right. And what I'm going to do is
basically the inverse operation, I'm going to use JSON convert.
And here what I'm going to instead of deserializing, I'm
going to serialize an object. In this case, I don't need to
specify the type because as soon as I give it the object itself,
which is going to be the serialized, right, then JSON is
going to know what to do with this. And after I do that, then
what I can do is I can just print the entire JSON serialized
object alright. So for example, like this, you can see that if I
do this now I have what I printed before and now I have a
full fledge first class citizen json file with the name channel
active, etc, etc. No All the information. So this is
going to be super, super handy if you ever need to do any JSON
serialization or D serialization. Now here for the
string, we actually did take this string from, we actually
copy pasted the string right over here. But this is also
something that we could read from a file. So I can just say
here, string that JSON. And can I read the information that is
inside a JSON file somewhere in my system, and in my system, I
have this file here. So for example, this is going to be
system dot I, oh, read all the text. And then here, what I
would like to do is I would like to input where my file is. So
that's going to be somewhere here in my system. So I can
right click with and copy as a path here. And then I can just
say, with the, with the ad, so that I don't have to escape all
these characters. See user's desktop parameter, Kendall
Jackson. And then hopefully, this should also work, correct?
Yes, it does work. And now the information is being read by the
by from the file. Okay. Beautiful. So if you're working
with data, JSON files, if you're doing HTTP POST request, GET
request, etc, etc. From C sharp, all of these is going to be
extremely, extremely useful for you. All right. So hopefully
this was useful. Thank you very much for watching this video. If
you liked what you saw, please subscribe to the channel, watch
our other videos, say hi, join our Discord, etc, etc. Okay,
thanks a lot. Bye bye.
