Question

I want to control the output of the root node when returning IEnumerable<T>. Currently, I get an <ArrayOf_> node as the root:

<ArrayOfMyClass xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
    <MyClass>
            <Number>1</Number>
    </MyClass>
    <MyClass>
            <Number>2</Number>
    </MyClass>
</ArrayOfMyClass>

I want to be able to change this to something else (and for that matter, without a namespace):

<NewRoot>
    <MyClass>
            <Number>1</Number>
    </MyClass>
    <MyClass>
            <Number>2</Number>
    </MyClass>
</NewRoot>

I don’t want to create a group class, because although this would work for XML, I don’t want the group class collection property in my JSON output:

{
    "ListOfMyClass": [
        {
            "Number": 1
        },
        {
            "Number": 2
        }
    ]
}

Instead I want to keep it as it would be by default:

[
    {
        "Number": 1
    },
    {
        "Number": 2
    }
]

I realise there are a few similar questions that have appear to have been answered but all them lead me to a dead end. I could also hack the result myself (yuck), but I’m hoping there is a best-practice way to do this with the stuff provided; annotations, formatters etc.

Has anyone had any success with this whilst leaving the JSON output as the default?

Answer 1

Have you tried this?

public MyController : ApiController
{
    public NewRoot Get()
    {
        // return data
    }
}

public NewRoot: IEnumerable<MyClass>
{
}