Question

I’m currently developing a small REST API for my application. It works fine. There’s one problem, though. The results returned to the user contain too much data. My controller looks like this:

public JsonResult Profile(string name)
{
    var encodedName = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(name);
    var n = encodedName.Replace('+', ' ');
    var profile = profileSource.GetProfileForName(n);

    if (profile == null)
    {
        HttpContext.Response.StatusCode = 404;
    }

    // XXXXX: how to remove certain fields from the profile?

    return Json(profile, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}

Any idea what’s the cleanest way to deal with this? Is there some way to annotate the profile model so that certain fields won’t get serialized? I guess alternatively I could construct a custom Model for this specific case or hack that JsonResult somehow. Either of these ways adds some extra overhead, though.

Answer 1

You can use the LINQ select method to project into an anonymous type.