I am using the Entity Framework code first for data access and I have a Company class which has a collection of Employees. The Employee class also has a Company property.
I would like to be able to serialize a Company and include the list of employees in the serialization.
Here is Company:
public class Company
{
public long Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
public DateTime? Established { get; set; }
public virtual IList<Employee> Employees { get; set; }
public DateTime? DateCreated { get; set; }
public DateTime? DateUpdated { get; set; }
}
Here is Employee
public class Employee
{
public long Id { get; set; }
public string FirstName { get; set; }
public string LastName { get; set; }
public int Age { get; set; }
public virtual Company Company { get; set; }
public DateTime? DateCreated { get; set; }
public DateTime? DateUpdated { get; set; }
}
I get a serialization Exception "Self referencing loop detected for type" when I try to serialize a Company object.
Thanks.
I think they have fixed this in the latest version.
Check out the help docs under the section "Serializing and Deserializing JSON -> Serialization and Preserving Object References".
Set this setting when initializing the JSON.Net Serializer:
PreserveReferencesHandling = PreserveReferencesHandling.Objects;
So an example would be this:
var serializerSettings = new JsonSerializerSettings { PreserveReferencesHandling = PreserveReferencesHandling.Objects };
string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(people, Formatting.Indented, serializerSettings);
I verified that this works with my code first solution, and a circular reference in the navigation properties. If you look at the resulting JSON it should have "$id" and "$ref" properties everywhere.