create json string on client side

Question

Hi,

I am trying to create the JSON string / object that is equivalent to the following data on the server side. can somebody help?

Public Shared Function GetData() As List(Of Employee)
    Dim list As New List(Of Employee)()

    Dim newEmployee As New Employee()

    newEmployee.EmployeeID = "1"
    newEmployee.FirstName = "Sridhar"
    newEmployee.Title = "Programmer"
    newEmployee.BirthDate = "8/10/1979"
    newEmployee.TitleOfCourtesy = "Programmer"
    list.Add(newEmployee)
    Return list
 End Function

Employee is a class with the properties EmployeeId, FirstName, Title, Birthdate, TitleOfCourtesy.

Thanks, sridhar.

Answer 1

Why not just use JSON.NET and let it handle encoding/decoding for you?

Answer 2

There's a good jQuery plugin for JSON. It lets you go from a JavaScript object to JSON very easily.

http://code.google.com/p/jquery-json/

Answer 3

Keep in mind that in Javascript there is no concept of a class, only objects. This also carries over into JSON. Look at this:

{"Employee" : 
     {
        "EmployeeID":"1",
        "FirstName":"Sridhar",
        etc...
     }
 }

If you look at the first line, the "Employee" symbol does absolutely nothing for the JSON. Remember that we're dealing with ONLY objects.

Thats why this works, like you said.

[
{"EmployeeID":1,
"LastName":"Duggireddy",
"FirstName":"Sridhar",
"Title":"Programmer",
"TitleOfCourtesy":"Programmer",
"BirthDate":new Date(303091200000)}
]

To make this programatically, declare your employee objects, and just add them into an array, like so:

var employees = [];
employees.push(employee1); // you would use a loop, of course
employees.push(employee2);
...
var jsonString = parser.toJSON(employees); // or whatever you use.

That should give you a list of objects. Always ignore the class in JSON... .NET during the deserialization will attempt to coerce the object into that particular class. You only have problems if this fails - maybe because a variable is missing or of the wrong type.