Regex For Work Items in Team Services API

Question

I'm retrieving a list of Work Items using the VSTS API and would like to display them on my web app. I can successfully return a list of the work items in the format below:

{"count":1,"value":[{"id":246,"rev":4,"fields":{"System.Id":246,"System.State":"New","System.Title":"test1"},"url":"https://example.visualstudio.com/_apis/wit/workItems/246"}]}

I have tried a regular expression to get the values from this HTTP response with the following code:

HttpResponseMessage getWorkItemsHttpResponse = client.GetAsync("_apis/wit/workitems?ids=" + ids + "&fields=System.Id,System.Title,System.State&asOf=" + workItemQueryResult.asOf + "&api-version=2.2").Result;

                    if (getWorkItemsHttpResponse.IsSuccessStatusCode)
                    {
                        result = getWorkItemsHttpResponse.Content.ReadAsStringAsync().Result;

                        // Regular expression to extract work item values to display    
                        string parseWI = result.ToString();
                        var match = Regex.Match(parseWI, "\"System.ID\": (.*)");
                        workItemsToDisplay = (match.Groups[1].Value);


                    }
                }
            }
        }
        return workItemsToDisplay;

    }

This is refusing to return anything though and leaves the textbox I display the workItemsToDisplay in empty. I'm not familiar with regular expressions and i'm sure this is where the issue stems from. Not sure if Microsoft already has sample code to construct a display of Work Items from the response.

Daniel Mann Daniel Mann · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-27T15:03:59

Don't use a regex. That's JSON, use a JSON parsing library (JSON.Net is the de facto standard in the .NET world) and then you can easily retrieve specific fields.

Regex For Work Items in Team Services API

1 Answers