JSON and CRM Sandbox Plugins

Today I was working on a plugin and one of the requirements was a call to a web service passing some POST parameters, nothing complicated but I want to share part of the process.

Normally I register my plugins always inside Sandbox, the main reason is that I don't need to care where the plugin is executed (in this specific case the development is OnPremise but the production is Online), the second reason is that my user is often forgotten to be added as Deployment Administrator :)

One of the parameter was a JSON Object passed as string, practically I needed to do the C# equivalent of a JSON.stringify in order to pass a complex structure. An example can be the following Course object (JavaScript):

var Course = new Object();
Course.Name = "CRM Development 1";
Course.Teacher = "Prof. John Smith";

Course.Students = new Array();
Course.Students[0] = new Object();
Course.Students[0].ID = "001";
Course.Students[0].Name = "Walter Davis";

Course.Students[1] = new Object();
Course.Students[1].ID = "002";
Course.Students[1].Name = "Mark Harris";

var parameter1 = JSON.stringify(Course);

Because I was inside a Sandbox plugin I couldn't use the Newtonsoft.Json library and I didn't want to waste time trying to merge it inside my plugin.

The .NET framework provides different methods to create a JSON output, in particular JavaScriptSerializer (from System.Web.Script.Serialization namespace) and DataContractJsonSerializer (from System.Runtime.Serialization.Json namespace).

JavaScriptSerializer is very easy to use (it has a Serialize method returning a string) but doesn't work inside Sandbox, so I used DataContractJsonSerializer:

Course course = new Course();
// ...

string parameter1 = "";
using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
{
   DataContractJsonSerializer serializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(Course));
   serializer.WriteObject(memoryStream, course);
   parameter1 = Encoding.Default.GetString(memoryStream.ToArray());
}

A bit longer code but compatible with Sandbox and CRM Online.