Question

I’m testing the new ApiController in asp.net mvc 4 beta but when I try to return an class that looks like the following only a few properties gets serialized?

public class PageModel : IPageModel {
    public string Id { get; set; }
    public virtual IPageMetadata Metadata { get; private set; }
    public PageModel() {
        Metadata = new PageMetadata();
    }
}

this is the code in my api controller

    // GET /api/pages/5
    public PageModel Get(string id) {
        return new PageModel { Id = "pages/1", Metadata = {Name = "Foo"} };
    }

and this is the result

{
Id: "pages/1",
Parent: null
}

Is it possible to get the complete object and not only a few things?

Answer 1

Readonly properties are not serialized. Make the setter of the Metadata property public if you want it to be serialized. I think that this behavior is normal for input parameters but not for output which is your case. IMHO it’s a bug that could be workarounded by using a JSON serializer which supports this but maybe they will fix it before the final release and allow readonly properties to be serialized for output parameters.

Actually it’s not a big pain, because you should be using view models anyway, so simply map your domain model to a view model and have your method return this view model which will contain only the properties that you need to actually expose to the client. This view model will contain properties with public getters and setters.