Question

I have a class structure in C#, similar to the following:

[DataContract]
class Data
{
    [DataMember] public List<Hotel> Hotels { get; set; }
    // etc...
}

[DataContract]
class Hotel
{
    [DataMember] public int HotelID { get; set; }
    [DataMember] public string HotelName { get; set; }
    // etc...
}

I’ve been serializing this to JSON, using the ‘DataContractJsonSerializer’.

However, because JSON includes all the property names, this makes for a lot of redundant text.

(You might say gZip alleviates this, but I believe gZip compresses only a portion of the output, like the first n kilobytes, so in this case, it’s not really going to help.)

So what I’d prefer to do is spit out the data in the format of a Javascript array, like this:

[[1, "firstHotel"], [2, "secondHotel"], [3, "thirdHotel"], ...]

Is there any way of customizing the JSON serialization to do it this way? Or should I just manually write my own serializer?

Answer 1

What I was attempting isn’t necessary, since gzip compression will take care of the entire JSON feed, removing any redundancy.