Newtonsoft JsonConvert.DeserializeObject how to ignore empty objects

Question

I have the following class definitions:

public class Tag
{
    public Guid? TagId { get; set; }
    public string TagText { get; set; }
    public DateTime C         


        

Answer 1

You could use a custom JsonConverter to ignore the empty objects during deserialization. Something like this could work:

class IgnoreEmptyItemsConverter : JsonConverter
{
    public override bool CanConvert(Type objectType)
    {
        return objectType.IsAssignableFrom(typeof(List));
    }

    public override object ReadJson(JsonReader reader, Type objectType, object existingValue, JsonSerializer serializer)
    {
        List list = new List();
        JArray array = JArray.Load(reader);
        foreach (JObject obj in array.Children())
        {
            if (obj.HasValues)
            {
                list.Add(obj.ToObject(serializer));
            }
        }
        return list;
    }

    public override bool CanWrite
    {
        get { return false; }
    }

    public override void WriteJson(JsonWriter writer, object value, JsonSerializer serializer)
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }
}

To use the converter, just add a [JsonConverter] attribute to your Tags property like this:

public class Wiki
{
    ...
    [JsonConverter(typeof(IgnoreEmptyItemsConverter))]
    public IEnumerable Tags { get; set; }
}

Fiddle: https://dotnetfiddle.net/hrAFsh