I manage a number of Bed & Breakfast websites and run a kind of booking engine to help the client do bookings directly on their website (as opposed to going to another site to close the deal).
I am working on creating a web service using ASP.NET WCF to create a JSON response about room availability of the hotels I manage. I have configured the web service to serialize the response in JSON. Everything works reasonable well EXCEPT I cannot quite construct the proper objects to get the JSON response I want.
In order do the handoff properly, I am required to return a JSON response structured in the following way:
{
"api_version" : 10 ,
"lang" : "en_US",
"hotels" :
[
{
"name" : "Example Hotel",
"email" : "concierge@example.com",
"phone" : "555-555-5555",
"fax" : "555-555-5555",
"room_types" :
{
"Orchid Room" :
{
"url" : "http://hotel.com/orchid",
"desc" : "One queen bed etc."
},
"Presidential Suite" :
{
"url" : "http://hotel.com/predidential",
"desc" : "One king bed etc."
}
}
}
]
}
I have no problem configuring my WCF service to return objects in JSON serialization. However, where I am confused is how to construct the "room_types" part of the object. Now, the issue is that for each hotel in my system I will have DIFFERENT room types, so I need to somehow dynamically generate the room_types object. But I don't know to structure the objects properly.
Here are the data contracts I have set up so far which do not serialize into JSON properly:
<DataContract()>
Public Class InventoryResponseObject
<DataMember(order:=0)> Public Property api_version As Integer
<DataMember(order:=1)> Public Property lang As String
<DataMember(order:=2)> Public Property hotels As hotelsObject
<DataMember(order:=3)> Public Property errors As List(Of String)
End Class
<CollectionDataContract()>
Public Class hotelsObject
Inherits List(Of HotelObject)
Public Sub New()
End Sub
End Class
<DataContract()>
Public Class HotelObject
<DataMember(order:=0)> Public Property name As String
<DataMember(order:=1)> Public Property email As String
<DataMember(order:=2)> Public Property phone As String
<DataMember(order:=3)> Public Property fax As String
<DataMember(order:=4)> Public Property room_types As RoomTypeCollectionObject
End Class
<DataContract()>
Public Class RoomTypeInfoObject
<DataMember(order:=0)> Public Property url As String
<DataMember(order:=1)> Public Property desc As String
End Class
<CollectionDataContract()>
Public Class RoomTypeCollectionObject
Inherits List(Of RoomTypeInfoObject)
Public Sub New()
End Sub
End Class
This will produce the following incorrect JSON resopnse:
{
"api_version" : 10 ,
"lang" : "en_US",
"hotels" :
[
{
"name" : "Example Hotel",
"email" : "concierge@example.com",
"phone" : "555-555-5555",
"fax" : "555-555-5555",
"room_types" :[
{
"url" : "http://hotel.com/orchid",
"desc" : "One queen bed etc."
},
{
"url" : "http://hotel.com/predidential",
"desc" : "One king bed etc."
}
]
}
]
}
I am stumped. Any assistance would be hugely appreciated.
Ok I found a solution. It required two steps: