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I'll summarise the question then explain the steps to how I solved this. It's not hard, but there's some tricks newbies might miss.

Given some json string, how can I easily deserialize the json string into a class (with children/nested classes, etc)

If we have the json schema (which you did provide), we need to do the following:

• Create some classes (which the data will be persisted too)
• Get the json text
• Deserialize
• Test/Assert.

Exactly like @chetanRanpariya said, let's use a website that generates these for us. Sure, having a small json might be trivial, but when you get a large json schema, then this saves you HEAPS of time.

Head over to https://json2csharp.com/ and paste your json schema in there, then ask that site to generate the output.

Even in the output they include a sample line of code to actually deserialize this!

The root class is a crap name, so I usually rename it to what the json schema (data) is about. For this example, I'll leave it .. but I would have renamed this to message or something.

Okay, so we have our classes generated as C# code .. now let's have a play.

To test out simple C# code, I next use another website called DotNet Fiddler.

In this current "fiddle" you can see that I:

• setup the json message
• deserialize this message into a root class.

and the Newtonsoft nuget library is smart enough to figure everything out.

Let's have a look at what I did, so you don't miss out on the tricks, to get this working:

In order of the things I did

• Changed it to NET5.0
• Added Newtonsoft.Json nuget library (latest version)
• Copy/Pasted the classes over from Json2CSharp. Notice how I've put them just under the Main method, here?
• Added that one line of code from Json2CSharp -> Root myDeserializedClass = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(myJsonResponse);
• Noticed that the code doesn't understand JsonConvert, so I added that namespace at the top of the file -> using Newtonsoft.Json;
• Now, created my fake json text and then passed that value into that deserialize method (notice the name of variable in the method name is (json)
• Created a few more lines of code to print out the values of the class which the json was deserialized to.

and voila! we have some json deserialized and working.

Newbie trick: Notice the weird json string? how it is: var json = @" ... that @ makes the string a MULTI-LINE string (also called a verbatim string literal or something). When you do this, it's easier to read large swaths of string data over multi lines .. but we have to double-quote any " (quotes). Normally, we escape a quote inside a string (e.g. \") but multi-lines don't like any escaping. It's a literal string .. hence the name.