Controlling serialization/deserialization

Hi,

I'm writing a simple REST service based on the ApiController class. All is well and i can consume data from JQuery.

I would like to modify the json slightly, specifically i want to change some names and exclude some properties of my model.

The model is very simple:

public class Comment
{
   public string Id {get;set;}
   public string Caption { get; set; }
   public string InternalInformation { get; set; }
}

The controller is

public IEnumerable<Comment> Get()
{
   return myVals;  // <- this is just a List<>
 
}

Now, i have tried to decorate my Model using [DataContract] and [DataMember] attributes setting the Name property. This works well for GET.

When i try to POST the same data back to my controller, the fields are not mapped correctly and i get nulls. My method for POST on the controller looks like this:

public Comment Post(Comment comment)
{
  //comment.Caption is null here...
}

If i rename the properties on my model, instead of using [DataMember(name=...)] to match the json all works well.

How can i specify the serilazation so it works for all http verbs?

Thanks,

Frederik

Re: Controlling serialization/deserialization

Can you please post the exact JSON that you are posting and it gets null? Also all your added decorations, since they are missing in the question.

Re: Controlling serialization/deserialization

Yes, sorry i should have included that:

First, the data contract

[DataContract]
 public class Comment
 {
 [DataMember(Name="id")]
 public string Id {get;set;}

[DataMember(Name = "caption")]
 public string MyInternalName { get; set; }

[DataMember(Name = "description")]
 public string Description { get; set; }

//information i do not want to be part of the data contract
 public string InternalInformation { get; set; }

}

Here's the http GET and the reply from the controller:

GET http://localhost:50359/api/famouspersons HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:50359
Connection: keep-alive
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1115.1 Safari/536.9
Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01
Referer: http://localhost:50359/
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: da-DK,da;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: ASP.NET Development Server/10.0.0.0
Date: Fri, 04 May 2012 12:53:56 GMT
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: -1
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Connection: Close

79
[{"caption":"Name1","description":"Description1","id":"id1"},{"caption":"Name2","description":"Description2","id":"id2"}]
0

The fields are "caption", "description" and "id" as expected.

Now i POST some data:

POST http://localhost:50359/api/famouspersons HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:50359
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 58
Origin: http://localhost:50359
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/536.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/20.0.1115.1 Safari/536.9
Content-Type: application/json
Accept: */*
Referer: http://localhost:50359/
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: da-DK,da;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3

{"id":"xx","caption":"Name3","description":"Description3"}

(Just a single record here, the POST is set up to receive one object)

POST simply returns the same object:

public Comment Post(Comment comment)
 {
   return comment;

}

Resulting in this capture in fiddler:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: ASP.NET Development Server/10.0.0.0
Date: Fri, 04 May 2012 13:01:51 GMT
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Expires: -1
Content-Type: application/json
Connection: Close

37
{"caption":null,"description":"Description3","id":"xx"}
0

Unfortunately "caption" is null when i receive the object in the POST handler. The other fields are populated correctly.

Thanks!! :)

Re: Controlling serialization/deserialization

You can create a custom formatter that bind your parameters correctly.

Re: Controlling serialization/deserialization

Fred, It looks like you are using Beta bits. In beta, the formatter's were used while replying where as MVC kind of model binding is used for processing the request. Model binding did not used to work well with DataContract attributes. Thus the same response returned by formatter in your scenario is not well processed as request with model binding.

This has been fixed a little while ago. From now on, Formatter is always used to process the body both for request and response. You could use the latest bits as per instructions in Henrik's blog - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/henrikn/archive/2012/04/29/using-nightly-nuget-packages-with-asp-net-web-stack.aspx

Thanks.

Re: Controlling serialization/deserialization

Thanks, i'll give it a spin.