Creating a string that uses key value pairs and extract the values from it by key

Question

I have need to store key value pairs in a string. I cannot store them in any other type because the function I am passing these values to takes a param called additionalData and it is of type string.

string data = "FirstName: Mike, LastName: Jones, UserId: 101"

I then need to be able to retrieve each value based on the key.

I could do something like this and then do string.join to create an array when retrieving but prefer not to because I want to use key value:

string data = string.Format("{0}|{1}|{2} ", "Mike", "Jones", 101)

Kien Chu · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-26 04:13:03Z

2

User user = new User { FirstName = "Mike", LastName = "Jones", UserId = 101 }; string userJson = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(user);

You can create User object and parse to json using https://www.nuget.org/packages/Newtonsoft.Json/

And later when you want to deserialize it, you can use the code below:

User user = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<User>(userJson);

Hope it helps.

answered Sep 26, 2015 at 4:13

Kien Chu

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3 Comments

William Venice Over a year ago

For some reason I thought I was trapped but forgot I could simply create a customer user object and use Json. The thing that I don't like here is that I already have a business entity called User and I don't want to pass all of its properties so I am not sure what I would call this object within my UI layer.

dbc Over a year ago

You can also serialize an anonymous type with Json.NET. See newtonsoft.com/json/help/html/CreateJsonAnonymousObject.htm

Kien Chu Over a year ago

It depends on which UI layer you are using. In case you are developing web application, one use case is you want to do an ajax call. Another example is you want to expose a web service for native mobile application to call.

Daniel Mann · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-26 04:05:14Z

Pass a well-known, regular format that can easily be serialized and deserialized, like XML or JSON.

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