Getting a deserialing error when getting from the Wordpress rest API, unexpected { in [0].title

Question

We are creating an application in Xamarin that is aimed at the Android market. We need to pull a list of objects off of the Wordpress API in order to populate a list view.

The code seems to be erroring at the deserialisation part of the code. EventLW is a ListView on the front-end of the application.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading.Tasks;

using Xamarin.Forms;
using Xamarin.Forms.Xaml;
using System.Net.Http;
using Newtonsoft.Json;

namespace StudioDen.View
{
    [XamlCompilation(XamlCompilationOptions.Compile)]
    public partial class Events : ContentPage
    {
        public Events()
        {
            InitializeComponent();

            GetProducts();

        }

        private async void GetProducts()
        {
            HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
            var response = await client.GetStringAsync("http://studioden.uk/wp-json/wp/v2/events/");

            var events = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Events>>(response);
            eventLV.ItemsSource = events;
        }
    }
}

Newtonsoft.Json.JsonReaderException Message=Unexpected character encountered while parsing value: {. Path '[0].title', line 1, position 341.

Any ideas on what is going wrong here? I followed a youtube tutorial and I don't think it is an issue with the code directly but with the Json string from the call.

Answer 1

You are deserializing the response object and not the response content. The following is what you need to do

private async void GetProducts()
{
    HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
    var response = await 
    client.GetAsync("http://studioden.uk/wpjson/wp/v2/events/");

     if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
     {
         var content = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync ();
         var events = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<List<Events>>(content);
     }
     else
     {
         //Do stuff based on the status, was the content found, 
         //was there a server error etc.
     }
    ...
}

Explanation on the above code

You send a request and get a response object which includes headers, status code, messages etc.

you check that the request is successful(if it isn't you want to handle a bad request or server error etc)

you then need to read the response content into a string then deserialize the json in that string value. before finally populating your list view