I always enjoy reading ScottGu's Blog. A recent post about Json and extension methods grabbed my attention, since I've been looking into Json. I'm using Delphi, so I wondered how I could do something similar, and then it occurred to me that Class Helpers would enable me to do that.

What follows is the Delphi for dotnet version

  TJsonHelper=class Helper for TObject
  public
    function ToJson():string;overload;
    function ToJson(recursionDepth:integer):string;overload;
  end;



implementation

uses
  System.Web.Script.Serialization;

{ TJsonHelper }

function TJsonHelper.ToJson: string;
var
  serializer: JavaScriptSerializer;
begin
  serializer:=JavaScriptSerializer.Create;
  result:=serializer.Serialize(self);
end;

function TJsonHelper.ToJson(recursionDepth:integer): string;
var
  serializer: JavaScriptSerializer;
begin
  serializer:=JavaScriptSerializer.Create;
  serializer.RecursionLimit:=recursionDepth;
  result:=serializer.Serialize(self);
end;

Pretty cool.

You need to add a reference to the System.Web.Extensions assembly to your project. Once you add the unit reference for the class above, you can now do

  someOne:=Person.Create;
  someOne.Firstname:='John';
  someOne.Sirname:='Smith';

  people.Add(someOne);

  Context.Response.Write(people.ToJson);

 Person is an object I created with a couple of properties and people is declared as List<Person>