Question

I’m using the EF4.1 DbContext code generation, which creates POCO entities like this:

public partial class Employee
{
    public Employee()
    {
        this.Roles = new HashSet<Role>();
    }

    public System.Guid EmployeeGUID { get; set; }
    public string EmployeeID { get; set; }
    public string PIN { get; set; }
    public string FullName { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string MiddleName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public string JobTitle { get; set; }
    public string DepartmentDescription { get; set; }
    public Nullable<System.DateTime> LatestHireDate { get; set; }
    public string CompanyEmailAddress { get; set; }
    public Nullable<System.Guid> SupervisorGUID { get; set; }
    public string SupervisorFullName { get; set; }
    public string SupervisorCompanyEmailAddress { get; set; }
    public string JobCode { get; set; }

    public virtual ICollection<Role> Roles { get; set; }
}

How is this accomplished?

Answer 1

Instead of serializing your DBContext entities, I would create DTOs (Data Transfer Object) that represents what really needs to be serialized. Then, I would use something like AutoMapper to map your DBContext entities to your DTOs.

Update: This is a bit out of date, but the author explains some of the great uses for AutoMapper.