ServiceStack Deserialize Json (with types) to List of specific type

Question

I have this json:

    {
    "$type": "System.Collections.Generic.List<MyType>",
    "$values": [
        {
            "$type": "MyType",
            "o": 7.54,
            "t": 1619002800000,
            "n": 3
        },
        {
            "$type": "MyType",
            "o": 7.53,
            "t": 1619005140000,
            "n": 3
        }
    ]
}

I want to deserialize it back into a List<MyType>. I thought there would be an easy way to do that some thing like this:

var myList = json.FromJson<MyType>();

but that doesn't work.

I have figured out a way to accomplish my goal but it's a bit messy so I was wondering if there's a better way that I'm not aware of. Here's the messy way I came up with:

var myListOfObject = (List<object>)((Dictionary<string, object>)JSON.parse(json))["$values"];
var myTypes = myListOfObject.ConvertAll(x => JSON.stringify(x).FromJson<MyType>());

I'm not necessarily looking for fewer lines of code because 2 isn't anything to complain about. I'm just hoping there is a way that doesn't require all the casting and parsing and rather can accept the json as is and get it back to the type it came from. Maybe there's even a parameter I can set to tell it to validate types during the deserialization since the full type names are in the json.

Answer 1

You should use the same serializer you used to serialize the payload to deserialize it. ServiceStack.Text uses __type to embed its type information, in a different schema so you wont be able to use ServiceStack.Text to automatically deserialize it into the embedded type.

This likely used JSON.NET which you should use instead to deserialize it, otherwise yeah you can use ServiceStack's JS Utils to deserialize arbitrary JSON as you're doing.