Cleaning up the Player Class

Unfortunately our JSON file has property names that 0:00 aren't the proper naming convention in C#. 0:03 We need to clean it up a bit. 0:06 Our player class also has a bunch of fields we really don't need. 0:08 We can ignore a lot of these fields. 0:12 Actually, I don't even know what half of them mean. 0:14 We can just delete them and they won't be de-serialized. 0:18 We need to figure out which fields we need though. 0:21 I have an idea about what we can use this data for. 0:24 We can see who the top ten scoring players in the MLS are this season. 0:28 For that we'll only need fields like name and points. 0:32 I'll delete everything here up to first name. 0:37 Then I'll keep ID, then delete everything except for points per game. 0:44 And then we'll keep second name which is the last name. 0:58 Then we'll also keep the team name. 1:03 Everything else can go. 1:08 Now we can rename the properties we need but 1:12 some of these will deserialize just fine if we change the case. 1:14 But when we start taking out things like underscores, we need 1:18 to tell the serializer what to look for when trying to deserialize this property. 1:22 This is a common task in serializing, so let's go to Google and 1:27 see if anyone else has come across this scenario. 1:30 Let's see, json serialize 1:34 property to different name. 1:41 Let's check this first link here from Stack Overflow. 1:48 What would we do without stack overflow? 1:52 Let's see. 1:56 Looks like they're trying to do the same thing we are. 2:01 Let's check out the answer. 2:03 You could decorate the property you wish controlling its name with the JSONProperty 2:06 attribute which allows you to specify a different name. 2:10 Great. Let's try it out. 2:13 We can copy this attribute here. 2:15 And above our first name property, we can paste what we found from the answer. 2:19 Looks like we need to add the JSON.NET namespace to our class. 2:24 A quick way we can do this is to right-click on JSONProperty, 2:28 since it's got the red squiggly line, and choose Quick Actions. 2:32 The first one here wants to add the using directive and 2:37 now a red squiggly line is gone. 2:43 Then we can change this property name to property name. 2:46 And then we'll change this to FirstName in proper case. 2:52 Now let's see if it will serialize the first name. 2:59 We can go back to our main method and print out the first name to the console. 3:02 FirstName. 3:08 Let's see if adding the attribute worked. 3:09 Add a break point and F5. 3:13 All right, these look like first names to me. 3:19 You might not have seen an attribute before. 3:27 In C#, attributes are a way to decorate classes, properties, and 3:30 methods with some additional information about them. 3:34 It's like metadata. 3:37 They don't really do anything, but 3:38 they can be used to determine if something should be done with them. 3:40 You can even create your own attributes, 3:43 [LAUGH] but that's definitely a subject for another course. 3:45 Let's go and do the rest. 3:49 Why don't you pause the video and 3:51 get some practice adding these attributes to our class? 3:52 Now I'll paste in my code. 3:57 Now let's run it again and take a look at our properties. 4:06 Breakpoint is still there, so F5. 4:10 And hover over players. 4:15 And looks like our properties are serializing just fine. 4:19 But look at points per game, it's a string. 4:24 That should definitely be a number. 4:27 We can just change the type in the player class to a double and 4:30 JSON.net should do the parsing for us. 4:35 Now let's run it again and 4:41 see if our points per game is being serialized correctly. 4:42 That's a 0, that's a 2, looks good. 4:54