A bit late and not exactly suited here, but I'm gonna add my solution here, because my question had been closed as a duplicate of this one, and because this solution is completely different.
I needed a general way to instruct Json.NET to prefer the most specific constructor for a user defined struct type, so I can omit the JsonConstructor attributes which would add a dependency to the project where each such struct is defined.
I've reverse engineered a bit and implemented a custom contract resolver where I've overridden the CreateObjectContract method to add my custom creation logic.
public class CustomContractResolver : DefaultContractResolver {
protected override JsonObjectContract CreateObjectContract(Type objectType)
{
var c = base.CreateObjectContract(objectType);
if (!IsCustomStruct(objectType)) return c;
IList<ConstructorInfo> list = objectType.GetConstructors(BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic).OrderBy(e => e.GetParameters().Length).ToList();
var mostSpecific = list.LastOrDefault();
if (mostSpecific != null)
{
c.OverrideCreator = CreateParameterizedConstructor(mostSpecific);
c.CreatorParameters.AddRange(CreateConstructorParameters(mostSpecific, c.Properties));
}
return c;
}
protected virtual bool IsCustomStruct(Type objectType)
{
return objectType.IsValueType && !objectType.IsPrimitive && !objectType.IsEnum && !objectType.Namespace.IsNullOrEmpty() && !objectType.Namespace.StartsWith("System.");
}
private ObjectConstructor<object> CreateParameterizedConstructor(MethodBase method)
{
method.ThrowIfNull("method");
var c = method as ConstructorInfo;
if (c != null)
return a => c.Invoke(a);
return a => method.Invoke(null, a);
}
}
I'm using it like this.
public struct Test {
public readonly int A;
public readonly string B;
public Test(int a, string b) {
A = a;
B = b;
}
}
var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Test(1, "Test"), new JsonSerializerSettings {
ContractResolver = new CustomContractResolver()
});
var t = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Test>(json);
t.A.ShouldEqual(1);
t.B.ShouldEqual("Test");