Working with JSON Values that are C# Reserve Words.

While playing around with GitHub’s API for Gists, I discovered I couldn’t simply deserialize into an object because the API used the C# reserve word “public” as a property name. Luckily, the DataMember attribute has a “Name” property that allows to you explicitly map a JSON property to your object’s property of a different name:

   1:  namespace MyGistClient

   2:  {

   3:      [DataContract]

   4:      public class GistsResult

   5:      {

   6:          ...

   7:   

   8:          [DataMember(Name = "public")]

   9:          public bool IsPublic { get; set; }

  10:   

  11:          ...

  12:      }

  13:  }

While C# will let me make a property named “Public”, I decided to use “IsPublic” instead so I don’t have any issues if my object gets consumed by another .NET language that isn’t case sensitive.