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I disabled lazy loading and proxy creation in EF5 before returning any results in the Web Api. Everything worked fine. However, when i start to Include() other entities for eager fetching, some of the JSON objects look like this:
{
$ref: "14"
},
.. correct objects ..
{
$ref: "6"
},
..
What is this "$ref" that gets included in the list of results?
It’s coming from the JSON.NET serializer. It’s preserving object references. Take a look at the
following blog post. I guess you have some circular references in your object graph and JSON.NET is doing it’s best in a desperate effort to serialize this EF structure without crashing (which is what most JSON serializers would do anyway). It’s not a standard though.Personal advice: never serialize your EF entities. Always define view models and have your Web API methods return view models containing only the properties you are interested in.