Help using JSON API that requires Authentication with JWT token

[Sitten Spynne]

OK. This is a case of their API documentation not being 100% accurate. Welcome to development, this happens sometimes.

If you look at JSON as "a string", you will have a hard time interpreting it. You have to understand what the symbols mean. There's not many symbols and rules to remember:

• [] means an array. Arrays can contain values or objects, separated by commas.
• {} means an object. Objects can contain properties, separated by commas.
• A property has a name, enclosed in quotes, and a value. They are separated by a colon.
• A value can be:
  
  • A string, "which must be enclosed in quotes".
  • A number, which doesn't have quotes.
  • An array.
  • An object.

Building a VB object out of a JSON object is tough, compared to some other languages, because VB is very verbose and you can't really nest object declarations inside each other. When I read JSON, I tend to defer nested things until I can see the whole picture. Let's take a look at the JSON for /series/{id}. I won't copy/paste it here, for brevity, but I will show the parts I'm looking at.

This API call returns an object with one property: "data". That property is an array that contains other objects:

{
    "data" : [{ ... }, ... ]
}

I want to call this type "SeriesSearchResults", since it represents many possible results.

The one inside "data" looks really familiar:

{
    "added" : "string",
    ...
}

I want to call this type "SeriesSearchResult", since it's one result.

Public Class SearchSeriesResults
    Public Property data() As SearchSeriesResult()
End Class

Public Class SearchSeriesResult
    ... same as before ...
End Class

So now you're trying to deserialize:

Dim responseObject = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(Of SearchSeriesResults)(searchResults)

That's a heck of a lot more likely to work.

Note the difference between what you read and what it was: there is a "data" property and THAT contains an array. If the result had been an array alone, it would've looked like:

[ { ... }, { ... } ]

Especially since we now see their documentation isn't 100% accurate, it's important to know how to read JSON so you can figure out how it corresponds to objects.