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Handling Nested JSON with Dynamic Properties in C# Using Newtonsoft.Json

👀 Views: 72 đŸ’Ŧ Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-23
c# json deserialize newtonsoft.json C#

I'm having a hard time understanding I'm updating my dependencies and I've been struggling with this for a few days now and could really use some help... I'm working on a C# application that processes a REST API response which returns a nested JSON structure with dynamic properties. The JSON can vary widely; for instance, it may contain an unknown number of fields within an array of objects. I'm using Newtonsoft.Json for deserialization, but I keep running into issues when the properties don't match my initial model. Here's an example of the JSON I'm working with: ```json { "users": [ { "id": 1, "name": "John Doe", "attributes": { "age": 30, "location": "New York" } }, { "id": 2, "name": "Jane Smith", "attributes": { "age": 25, "hobbies": ["reading", "traveling"] } } ] } ``` I initially tried creating a model class like this: ```csharp public class User { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public Dictionary<string, object> Attributes { get; set; } } ``` And then deserializing with: ```csharp var json = await httpClient.GetStringAsync("https://api.example.com/users"); var users = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<RootObject>(json); ``` Where `RootObject` is defined as: ```csharp public class RootObject { public List<User> Users { get; set; } } ``` However, I'm receiving the following behavior when trying to access the attributes: ``` Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializationException: want to deserialize the current JSON array (e.g. [1,2,3]) into type 'System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[System.String,System.Object]' because the type requires a JSON object (e.g. {"name":"value"}). ``` It seems to happen when the `attributes` object contains an array instead of key-value pairs. I need to adapt my deserialization logic to handle this variability. I've tried changing the `Dictionary` to a `dynamic` type, but it doesn't compile. Is there a better approach for handling these dynamic properties without losing type safety? Any suggestions on how to implement this correctly would be greatly appreciated! What's the correct way to implement this? I'm coming from a different tech stack and learning C#. Any ideas how to fix this?