Asp.Net Mvc Consume Url posting json data - web-services

Question

I was wondering if anyone had any pointers for parsing json data consumed from a URL in Asp.Net. I've found plenty of docs about Model Binding json datatypes but this is coming from a URL and I cant seem to find an example for that. The closest thing I've found is datacontractjsonserializer but again, I cant seem to find an example of that in context with a URL outputting the json data. Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

You could use the JavaScriptSerializer class. You start by defining a model class which will hold the data. So let's suppose that the remote URL returns the following JSON:
{ name: 'John', addresses: [ { city: 'Paris' }, { city: 'London' } ] }
which could be represented by this model:
public class Person
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public Address[] Addresses { get; set; }
}
public class Address
{
public string City { get; set; }
}
And then deserialize the received JSON back to the model:
var serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
// TODO: Fetch the JSON from a remote URL
var json = "{name: 'foo', addresses: [{city: 'Paris'}, {city: 'London'}]}";
var person = serializer.Deserialize<Person>(json);
UPDATE:
In order to fetch the JSON from remote url you could use WebClient:
using (var client = new WebClient())
{
string json = client.DownloadString("http://someurl.com");
}

Answer 2

Here is what I have so far. A product of all answers that I get here in stack.
The idea is to get the json value from external web service and publish it in my controller as a json values and I dont have to create model for it. Hope this helps.
public class ApiJson: Controller
{
public JsonResult getUser()
{
WebClient client = WebClient();
NameValueCollection data = new NameValueCollection();
data.Add("param1", "value1");
byte[] result = client.UploadValues("http://localhost:9000/", data);
String json = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(result);
JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
dynamic item = serializer.Deserialize<object>(json);
return Json(item, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}
}