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