Question

I want to remove all properties from an object based off a list.

The reason is in my web service call my response object is rather large I want the ability to allow the client to restrict the properties returned from the object.

For example

/api/movie/1?filter=Name,Id,Gross

public class MovieResponse
{
     public string Name {get;set;}
     public int Id {get;set;}
     public double Gross {get;set;}
     public string Director {get;set;}
     public Rating Rating {get;set;}
}

I would want to return an object based on the above service call that looked like this

public class MovieResponse
{
     public string Name {get;set;}
     public int Id {get;set;}
     public double Gross {get;set;}
}

I assume if i’m using aspnet or wcf i would hook into the request lifecycle and the very last thing I do before I return the response to the client would be to run my filter/behavior that filters and returns the new object that would deserialized into JSON or XML

Answer 1

If you chose to serialize using JSON, you could create a dictionary, like @Randolf R-F said. The dictionary would then get serialized into an object, if you use Json.NET.

public static Dictionary<string, object> FilterMovie(MovieResponse movie, string[] fields)
{
    var data = new Dictionary<string, object>();
    var movieType = movie.GetType();

    foreach (var field in fields)
    {
        data.Add(field, movieType.GetField(field).GetValue(movie));
    }

    return data;
}

Then, on the other side, deserializing could be done using the MovieResponse class.