Question

Okay this could very likely be a silly question. I am using Entity Framework Code First. I have two classes, User and Event, that have a Many-To-Many relationship. When EF generates my database tables, it creates a join table, which I call Users_Events. This table has two columns, User_ID and Event_ID. Everything is fine so far.

I want to pull an Event from my database and serialize it to JSON. This also works perfectly except I cannot pull an Event’s Users because this would create a circular reference. What I want to do here is query my join table and get all the User_IDs that have an associated Event_ID equal to the ID of the Event I am serializing.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

I don’t know exactly what you want to end up with in your JSON, but I suspect you want to select into a new anonymous type and serialize that instead. Something along these lines maybe:

from e in myContext.Events
where e.ID = 123
select new { 
    Event = e,
    UserIDs = (from u in e.Users select u.ID)
}