Question

What is the best way to return only few properties to JSON Result from a collection IEnumerable?

Department object has 7properties I only need to 2 of them in client. Can I do this using C# anonymous types?

    public class Department
    {
        public string DeptId { get; set; }
        public string DeptName { get; set; }
        public string DeptLoc1 { get; set; }
        public string DeptLoc2 { get; set; }
        public string DeptMgr { get; set; }
        public string DeptEmp { get; set; }
        public string DeptEmp2 { get; set; }            
    }



    [HttpGet]
    public JsonResult DepartmentSearch(string query)
    {

        IEnumerable<Department> depts = DeptSearchService.GetDepartments(query);

        //Department object has 15 properties, I ONLY need 2 (DeptID and DeptName) in the view via returns JSON result)


        return Json(depts, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet); // I don’t want all the  properties of  a department object
   }

Answer 1

var deptnames = depts.Select(d => new { d.DeptID, d.DeptName });

Then just use deptnames