Question

I’m using Newtonsoft JSON.NET 4.5r7 in an MVC4 non-api project.

Below I rename “id” to DT_RowId for DataTables “mDataProp”, but also want to change the data, e.g. 42 becomes “row_42” during serialization.

sealed public class Species
{
    [JsonProperty("DT_RowId")]
    public long id { get; private set; } // Change me to row_{n}

    public int amu { get; private set; }

    public string chemicalFormula { get; private set; }
...
}

The documentation is a little hard to follow for someone not familiar with the library, and examples are lacking.

I can add a “row_n” property to each class, but coupling the view with the model is evil™

The question is: How to I alter the serialized data with JSON.net to achieve this result?

Answer 1

From the action instead of returning the model you could easily create an anonymous object using linq query and return it.

public JsonNetResult TestAction()
{
     ...

     var query = species.Select(s => new // species is a collection
     {  
        DT_RowId = .. you can change data as you need from s.id,
        amu = s.amu,
        chemicalFormula = s.chemicalFormula 
        ...
     });

     return new JsonNetResult{ Data = query.ToList() };

 }