JSON deserialization without using classes? (webservice client)

Question

I am trying to get around that C# prefers to have classes generated (I know they are easy to generate, but currently my format and parameters are changing a lot due to development in both client and server end).

Example of what I most often find when I try to find out to deserialize is that you first have to know the exact structure - then build a class - and then you can refer to it later on (it's fine, but it's just not what I would like to do):

Json format 1:

[{"FirstName":"Bob","LastName":"Johnson"},{"FirstName":"Dan","LastName":"Rather"}]

public class People 
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set;}
}

 public List<People> peopleList;
                          . . . // (same as first example) 
//Change the deserialize code to type <List<Class>>
   peopleList = deserial.Deserialize<List<People>>(response); 

That of course is easy as long as the reply doesn't change format, if for example the reply changes to a nested field :

Json format 2:

[{"FirstName":"Bob","LastName":"Johnson"},{"data":{"nestedfield1" :"ewr"} }]

I would of course have to change the class to represent that, but at the moment we are moving back and forth in formats and I would somehow like if there was a way where I could try to access json elements directly in the string?

For example, like I can do in Python:

mystring1 = reply ["firstName"] mystring2 = reply ["data"]["nestedfield1"]

Is there any way to achieve this in C#? It would speed up development rapidly if there was a way of accessing it without first referencing the output in the code to then once again reference the class variable that was created when referencing it.

And note it's for rapid development, not necessarily for the final implementation where I can see advantages by doing the class approach.

Another way of asking was maybe can it serialize taking any format (as long as its JSON) and dynamically build up a struct where I can access it with named keys and not as class variables?

Answer 1

to deserialize json without using classes you can use using Newtonsoft.Json

here's the code:

using System;
using Newtonsoft.Json;
using System.Text;

public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        var myJSONString = "[{\"FirstName\":\"Bob\",\"LastName\":\"Johnson\"},{\"FirstName\":\"Dan\",\"LastName\":\"Rather\"}]";
        dynamic obj = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(myJSONString);
        Console.WriteLine(obj[0].FirstName);
    }
}

The obj will perform the same way you use when generating classes, it can take any json string and deserialize into dynamic object regardless of structure of the json. Keep in mind that you won't get VS intellisense support.

UPDATE
Here's fiddle:
https://dotnetfiddle.net/xeLDpK