Unfortunately our JSON file has property names that

aren't the proper naming convention in C#.

We need to clean it up a bit.

Our player class also has a bunch of fields we really don't need.

We can ignore a lot of these fields.

Actually, I don't even know what half of them mean.

We can just delete them and they won't be de-serialized.

We need to figure out which fields we need though.

I have an idea about what we can use this data for.

We can see who the top ten scoring players in the MLS are this season.

For that we'll only need fields like name and points.

I'll delete everything here up to first name.

Then I'll keep ID, then delete everything except for points per game.

And then we'll keep second name which is the last name.

Then we'll also keep the team name.

Everything else can go.

Now we can rename the properties we need but

some of these will deserialize just fine if we change the case.

But when we start taking out things like underscores, we need

to tell the serializer what to look for when trying to deserialize this property.

This is a common task in serializing, so let's go to Google and

see if anyone else has come across this scenario.

Let's see, json serialize

property to different name.

Let's check this first link here from Stack Overflow.

What would we do without stack overflow?

Let's see.

Looks like they're trying to do the same thing we are.

Let's check out the answer.

You could decorate the property you wish controlling its name with the JSONProperty

attribute which allows you to specify a different name.

Great. Let's try it out.

We can copy this attribute here.

And above our first name property, we can paste what we found from the answer.

Looks like we need to add the JSON.NET namespace to our class.

A quick way we can do this is to right-click on JSONProperty,

since it's got the red squiggly line, and choose Quick Actions.

The first one here wants to add the using directive and

now a red squiggly line is gone.

Then we can change this property name to property name.

And then we'll change this to FirstName in proper case.

Now let's see if it will serialize the first name.

We can go back to our main method and print out the first name to the console.

FirstName.

Let's see if adding the attribute worked.

Add a break point and F5.

All right, these look like first names to me.

You might not have seen an attribute before.

In C#, attributes are a way to decorate classes, properties, and

methods with some additional information about them.

It's like metadata.

They don't really do anything, but

they can be used to determine if something should be done with them.

You can even create your own attributes,

[LAUGH] but that's definitely a subject for another course.

Let's go and do the rest.

Why don't you pause the video and

get some practice adding these attributes to our class?

Now I'll paste in my code.

Now let's run it again and take a look at our properties.

Breakpoint is still there, so F5.

And hover over players.

And looks like our properties are serializing just fine.

But look at points per game, it's a string.

That should definitely be a number.

We can just change the type in the player class to a double and

JSON.net should do the parsing for us.

Now let's run it again and

see if our points per game is being serialized correctly.

That's a 0, that's a 2, looks good.