An Interesting JSON Example

In web services development folks use JSON all the time. However, the JSON format itself is very interesting, in terms of the wide range of semantics (e.g. classes lists, dicts etc) it can represent

Recent I spent some time understanding the format itself.

Example 1:

{“Unixtimestamp”:14593556,”Entities”:[{“Id”:”eid1″},{“Id”:”math”},{“Id”:”computerscience”}],”CategoricalEntries”:[{“Name”:”course”,”Value”:”math”},{“Name”:”major”,”Value”:”computerscience”}],”NumericalEntries”:[{“Name”:”durationspentinmilliseconds”,”Value”:40.0}],”GeoLocations”:[{“Name”:”location”,”Latitude”:”0.34.5N”,”Longitude”:”3.456S”}]}

Example 2:

{“Unixtimestamp”:14593556,”Value”:100.0,”Entities”:{“userid”:”eid1″,”courseid”:”math”,”majorid”:”computerscience”},”CategoricalEntries”:{“course”:”math”,”major”:”computerscience”},”NumericalEntries”:{“durationspentinmilliseconds”:40.0},”GeoLocations”:[{“Latitude”:”0.34.5N”,”Longitude”:”3.456S”}]}

Notice how the “CategoricalEntries” section actually represents different semantics –

• Example1 : “CategoricalEntries” represents list of objects. The object has two properties explicitly called “Name” and “Value”
• Example2 : “CategoricalEntries” represents a Dictionary<string, string>

Code:

• constructJson
• constructJson2