by Aaron

Reading a text file (or JSON file) from a Windows 8 Runtime application

I just had need of reading a small JSON file into a Windows 8 application using the Windows Runtime. 

Uri uri = new Uri("ms-appx:///assets/data.json");

var storageFile = await Windows.Storage.StorageFile.GetFileFromApplicationUriAsync(uri);

using (var storageStream = await storageFile.OpenReadAsync())
{
    using (Stream stream = storageStream.AsStreamForRead())
    {
        using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream))
        {
            var jsonText = reader.ReadToEnd();
            var results = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<DemoData>(jsonText);
            this.DataContext = results;
        }
    }
}

What seemed like it should have been a common example on MSDN was not …, and after a bit of searching and reading, I believe the above code represents at least a common and safe way of loading data.

I’ve got a file called data.json stored in an Assets folder:

image

And the file’s Build Action is set to Content:

image

Change the value passed to the Uri constructor and … the file will be loaded successfully. Once loaded, I used the strongly typed generic DeserializeObject method to convert the Json data to a class called DemoData.