Question

I’m new to ASP.NET Web API.

I saw examples of how you can get and return POCOs in RESTful web application.

I wonder how in real world application you can pass only some of the properties of your POCO (for security and/or message size reasons).

I found that I can use the ‘[ScriptIgnore]’ attribute, but I’m looking for a way to customize which properties to pass according to the requesting controller, for example.

Does there is a nice, out of the box way, to do so?

Thanks

Answer 1

Probably the easiest is to decorate your POCO with System.Runtime.Serialization.DataContractAttribute and the members you want to include with System.Runtime.Serialization.DataMemberAttribute i.e.

[DataContract]
public class MyType
{
  [DataMember]
  public string Property1 {get; set;}
  public string Property2 {get; set;}
  public string Property3 {get; set;}
}

In this case only Property1 will be serialized. It;s worth noting, that both XmlMediaTypeFormatter and JsonMediaTypeFormatter will respect DataContract so you don’t need any XML/JSON specific attrbiutes.

Now, this will work in simpler solutions, for a real, well rounded approach you’d probably need to resort to DTOs instead of exposing your Models to the client.

You could use Automapper for that, and project Models to DTOs – you have a good introductory article here http://www.mono-software.com/blog/post/Mono/120/Using-AutoMapper-to-handle-DTOs/. Also, with Automapper you can have different types of DTOs created from the same base Model, which, I understand, is something you are interested in.