Christos Monogios

This week I had to deserialize a JSON string into a collection of C# objects. The class of these objects contained not only the properties that map directly to the JSON properties but also an extra property which I wanted to fill with values based on the values of other properties of the object.

Let us consider the following simple POCO class and its container, which is a simple array of Students:

A Visual Studio Item Template allows us to generate new files with code, so that we avoid having to manually create them. This automatization is very practical when we need to create similar classes more than one time. A template is being offered as option in the “Add new item” dialog of Visual Studio:

As I did in my previous article, I focus again on the Automapper framework.

When I map one object to another, I often deal with a target object that contains less properties than the source object. If I take no action, an exception is going to be thrown. For that we will have to declare the skipped properties by using the DoNotValidate method when we define the mapping (CreateMap) between the two objects.

Automapper is a handful tool for mapping the properties of two different type objects together. Such mappings are very common when you are dealing with a multi-tier architecture in your program. For example you want to map the entity object, which contains data from the database, with the UI-model object of your WebApi action.

For basic mapping examples refer to the Automapper documentation. In this article we will consider the following advanced example:

• Your entity model contains a property with a non-serialized string that you store in a table of your database

• Based on some condition checking, you want to or do not want to deserialize this string and store it into a property of different type of your UI-model object

For that you need a mapping between two properties of different type and also a function that runs every time to do this transformation:

In order to download and use a remote repository, which is stored in Azure DevOps, do the following two steps and you are good to go.