JavaScriptSerializer.Deserialize – how to change field names

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I took another try at it, using the DataContractJsonSerializer class. This solves it:

The code looks like this:

using System.Runtime.Serialization;

[DataContract]
public class DataObject
{
    [DataMember(Name = "user_id")]
    public int UserId { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Name = "detail_level")]
    public string DetailLevel { get; set; }
}

And the test is:

using System.Runtime.Serialization.Json;

[TestMethod]
public void DataObjectSimpleParseTest()
{
        DataContractJsonSerializer serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(DataObject));

        MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(JsonData));
        DataObject dataObject = serializer.ReadObject(ms) as DataObject;

        Assert.IsNotNull(dataObject);
        Assert.AreEqual("low", dataObject.DetailLevel);
        Assert.AreEqual(1234, dataObject.UserId);
}

The only drawback is that I had to change DetailLevel from an enum to a string – if you keep the enum type in place, the DataContractJsonSerializer expects to read a numeric value and fails. See DataContractJsonSerializer and Enums for further details.

In my opinion this is quite poor, especially as JavaScriptSerializer handles it correctly. This is the exception that you get trying to parse a string into an enum:

System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException: There was an error deserializing the object of type DataObject. The value 'low' cannot be parsed as the type 'Int64'. --->
System.Xml.XmlException: The value 'low' cannot be parsed as the type 'Int64'. --->  
System.FormatException: Input string was not in a correct format

And marking up the enum like this does not change this behaviour:

[DataContract]
public enum DetailLevel
{
    [EnumMember(Value = "low")]
    Low,
   ...
 }

This also seems to work in Silverlight.

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