Question

I have two POCO classes (Account and Invoice) and as you can see (below are mockups of these classes) they are recursive.

When I pass in an invoice object with the account property set and then try to store it using the redis client it causes a stackoverlow due to recursion. Below is an example of how I’m making the call.

CachingService.Store<Invoice>(invoiceObj);


public class CachingService {
    // ....
    public static void Store<T>(T obj)
    {
        using (var client = _redisClientsManager.GetClient())
        {   
            var typedClient = client.GetTypedClient<T>();
            typedClient.Store(obj);
        }
    }
}

Example of my POCO classes:

public class Account
{
    public string Name { set; get; }
    public bool IsActive { set; get; }

    public virtual ICollection<Invoice> Invoices { set; get; }
}

public class Invoice
{
    public bool IsPaid { set; get; }
    public DateTime? LastSent { set; get; }
    public int AccountId { set; get; }

    public virtual Account Account { set; get; }
}

Answer 1

Most serializers (ServiceStack included) does not support cyclical references. This is a major anti-pattern when designing DTOs.

To resolve this, you want to tell ServiceStack.Text’s serializers to ignore that property for Serialization which you can do using the [IgnoreDataMember] property or changing it so it’s not a public property or change it into a method.