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How to access inner properties of a Json Object?

I am learning C# and I am trying to parse json/xml responses and check each and every key and value pair. For xml I am converting to json so I have only one function/script to work with both cases. My issue is that I am working with a wide range of json responses which are not similar and there may be arrays in some of the json response. I have tried accessing the "Count" of the json object as a way to check for arrays.
Note: The responses will vary. This example is for Products > Product > name, quantity and category. The next response will change and can be like Country > State > Cities and so on. I cannot rely on creating classes since all responses are going to be different. Plus I am working on automating it so it should be able to handle anything thrown at it.
Sample Json I am working with:
{
"products": {
"product": [
{
"name": "Dom quixote de La Mancha",
"quantity": "12",
"category": "Book"
},
{
"name": "Hamlet",
"quantity": "3",
"category": "Book"
},
{
"name": "War and Peace",
"quantity": "7",
"category": "Book"
},
{
"name": "Moby Dick",
"quantity": "14",
"category": "Book"
},
{
"name": "Forrest Gump",
"quantity": "16",
"category": "DVD"
}
]
}
The way I am accessing the count, name and value is as follows:
dynamic dyn = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(jsonText);
foreach (JProperty property in dyn.Properties())
{
string propname = property.Name;
var propvalue = property.Value;
int count = property.Count;
}
Is there a way to access these without going through the foreach loop like int count = dyn.Count ? All I am getting from this is null instead of actual values.
For the above example my end result will be like:
This responses contains products> product> 5 x (name, quantity, category)
The QuickWatch for the object:
QuickWatch for dyn object

Try to deserialize your JSON into JObject like below:
var jObject = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<JObject>(jsonText);

C# How to combine multiple JSON arrays that are part of a List?

What has been done so far?
I am working on dividing up the number of records into 3 batches and processing them in parallel to increase the performance. However, after processing the batches in parallel I would also like to save the outcome (JSON string) of the processed records in a variable.
As you can see below, I first initialize the variable as List of string and then run the foreach loop which saves the processed outcome as mentioned below.
List<string> responseOutcome = new List<string>();
Parallel.ForEach(recordBatches, batch => {
responseOutcome.Add(response1.Content);
});
Result in List responseOutcome comes as:
responseOutcome[0]
[
{
"Name": "Sample1",
"ID": "123"
},
{
"Name": "Sample2",
"ID": "394"
}
],
responseOutcome[1]
[
{
"Name": "Sample5",
"ID": "384"
},
{
"Name": "Sample6",
"ID": "495"
}
],
responseOutcome[2]
[
{
"Name": "Sample3",
"ID": "473"
},
{
"Name": "Sample4",
"ID": "264"
}
]
What I would like to achieve?
Now I would like to take the value of responseOutcome which is multiple arrays of JSON string and merge them into one big JSON string.
Final Output
[
{
"Name": "Sample1",
"ID": "123"
},
{
"Name": "Sample2",
"ID": "394"
},
{
"Name": "Sample5",
"ID": "384"
},
{
"Name": "Sample6",
"ID": "495"
},
{
"Name": "Sample3",
"ID": "473"
},
{
"Name": "Sample4",
"ID": "264"
}
]
I looked into several similar cases but they weren't nearly similar. Like:
How do I merge multiple json objects
How do I combine two arrays from two JObjects in Newtonsoft JSON.Net?
Any help/guidance will be great!!

Using Newtonsoft, you can create a JArray from each of your responses. Then you can flatten the hierarchy using linq's SelectMany method and re-serialize the object.
Try this:
var obj = responses.Select(r => JArray.Parse(r.Trim(','))).SelectMany(token => token);
string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(obj, Formatting.Indented);

There are probably more efficient ways to do this if you want to do pure string manipulation, but using Newtonsoft, I would deserialize, merge and then re-serialize.
Create a small POCO model:
public class ResponseOutcomeModel
{
public string ID { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
}
Then deserialize to this model, merge and reserialize to JSON as a single list.
var outcomeList = new List<ResponseOutcomeModel>();
foreach (var i in responseOutcome)
{
outcomeList.AddRange(JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<ResponseOutcomeModel>>(i.Trim().TrimEnd(',')));
}
var finalJson = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(outcomeList);
Note, the Time/TrimEnd is used if the trailing commas in your example are really there in your responseOutcome array (at the end of each element in the array). The call to DeserializeObject will complain if you leave the commas in there.

Looping through JObject nested array

I can not figure out exactly how to did through this JObject in order to retrieve the id property under runs.
I have this following code which will successfully give me the id property that is under entries, but how can I nest this again to go into the runs sections and get those ID's?
JSON:
{
"id": 168,
"name": "section 1",
"entries": [
{
"id": "908-9876-908",
"suite_id": 15,
"name": "List 1",
"runs": [
{
"id": 169,
"suite_id": 15
}
]
},
{
"id": "998-4344-439",
"suite_id": 16,
"name": "List 2",
"runs": [
{
"id": 170,
"suite_id": 16
}
]
}
]
}
C# Code:
JObject obj = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<JObject>(response);
foreach (JObject id in obj["entries"])
{
string returnable = (string)id["id"];
Console.WriteLine(returnable);
}
I have tried looking at ["entries"]["runs"] but that also was not working.
The print out of this is:
908-9876-908
998-4344-439
What I would like is
169
170

You can achieve it using the following code
var jsonObject = JObject.Parse(json);
foreach (var entry in jsonObject["entries"])
{
foreach (var run in entry["runs"])
{
string returnable = (string)run["id"];
Console.WriteLine(returnable);
}
}
You would like to see
169
170
They are an id values from runs array, therefore you should enumerate them in the inner loop. You've also missed a comma after "name": "section 1"

You can use SelectTokens() to query for nested data inside a JToken hierarchy. It provides support for JSONPath queries including wildcards [*] for arrays:
var ids = obj.SelectTokens("entries[*].runs[*].id").Select(i => (long)i).ToList();
See: Querying JSON with complex JSON Path.
Demo fiddle here.

LINQ: get nested arrays based on a groupby?

Suppose I have this simple object definition:
public class Item
{
public int section { get; set; }
public string item { get; set; }
}
I have some data in a single-depth array. This is JSON, which would be converted to C# objects via Json.NET:
[
{
"section": 0,
"item": "Hello!"
},
{
"section": 1,
"item": "First Steps"
},
{
"section": 1,
"item": "How to Ask for Help"
},
{
"section": 2,
"item": "Your First Program"
},
{
"section": 2,
"item": "The Code"
},
{
"section": 2,
"item": "How It Works"
},
{
"section": 3,
"item": "Where To Go From Here"
}
]
Using Entity Framework or some other method, I have arrived at a simple list of these objects as stated above, contained within a var variable.
Now what I want to do is get the same list, but where each section is grouped as an array within the outer array. For example, the JSON of what I want looks like this:
[
[
{
"section": 0,
"item": "Hello!"
}
],
[
{
"section": 1,
"item": "First Steps"
},
{
"section": 1,
"item": "How to Ask for Help"
}
],
[
{
"section": 2,
"item": "Your First Program"
},
{
"section": 2,
"item": "The Code"
},
{
"section": 2,
"item": "How It Works"
}
],
[
{
"section": 3,
"item": "Where To Go From Here"
}
]
]
My initial thought was to do something with a LINQ query using the groupby statement but I don't think this is what I'm looking for - groupby seems to be analogous to the SQL version so it can only be used for aggregate operations.
The only other option I have found so far is to use a LINQ query to get a list of all of the sections:
var allSections = (from x in myData select x.section).Distinct();
...and then iterate through those IDs and manually build the array:
List<List<Item>> mainList = new List<List<Item>>();
foreach (int thisSection in allSections.ToArray())
{
List<Item> thisSectionsItems = (from x in myData where x.section == thisSection select x).ToList();
mainList.Add(thisSectionsItems);
}
return mainList;
This should result in a proper enumerable that I can feed into JSON.NET and get the expected result, but this seems inefficient.
Is there a more LINQ-ish, or at least more efficient, way to split the items into groups?

You can certainly achieve this with .GroupBy()
var grouped = items
.GroupBy(x => x.section) // group by section
.Select(x => x.ToArray()) // build the inner arrays
.ToArray(); // return collection of arrays as an array

JSON.NET reader problem

i got some problem when i generate .json file from spring .json ,and i got this format
{ "models": [
{
"id":1,
"modelName":"dfdsf",
"created":{
"userFullname":"demo",
"time":"150301",
"date":"20110208",
"userId":"123"
},
"remark":"dsfdf",
"updated":"~unique-id~1"
},
{
"id":2,
"modelName":"test",
"created":{
"userFullname":"test",
"time":"150301",
"date":"20110210",
"userId":"124"
},
"remark":"test",
"updated":{
"userFullname":"test",
"time":"150301",
"date":"20110209",
"userId":"test"
}
}
]}
first time i used JObject Parse for convert
JObject job = JObject.Parse(fullJson);
and the other hand i used jtoken to focus "models"
JToken jDetail = job["models"];
but the problem is {[{ xxx }]} it look like jarray i don't have any idea to convert it
i ever use JArray, JsonTextReader but it doesn't work.
could suggestion some? because if i pass this ll i set some value to object.
thank you for every idea.

string fullJson = File.ReadAllText("TextFile1.txt"); // for brevity
var job = JObject.Parse(fullJson);
var models = job.Value<JArray>("models");
Console.WriteLine(models[0]);
result:
{
"id": 1,
"modelName": "dfdsf",
"created": {
"userFullname": "demo",
"time": "150301",
"date": "20110208",
"userId": "123"
},
"remark": "dsfdf",
"updated": "~unique-id~1"
}