Having trouble serializing NetTopologySuite FeaturesCollection to GeoJSON

Question

Trying to return some pretty simple GeoJSON data. I found NetTopologySuite, and set up a simple FeaturesCollection and tried to serialize it out to a GeoJson string only to get the following error:

"Self referencing loop detected for property 'CoordinateValue' with type 'GeoAPI.Geometries.Coordinate'. Path 'Features[0].Geometry.Coordinates[0]'."

Looking through the class headers, Point uses Coordinate, which does have a Coordinate property so I can see why there would be a circular reference. The thing is, most (if not all) the Geometries seem to use Point, so that would make it impossible to ever serialize anything... unless I'm missing something.

So is this a bug or am I missing something?

Tested with just a Point and got the same error, so here's the code for that:

using NTS = NetTopologySuite;

var ret = new NTS.Geometries.Point(42.9074, -78.7911);

var jsonSerializer = NTS.IO.GeoJsonSerializer.Create();

var sw = new System.IO.StringWriter();
jsonSerializer.Serialize(sw, ret);

var json = sw.ToString();

Answer 1

Update

GeoJsonSerializer has been moved to NetTopologySuite.IO.GeoJSON and now has its own static Create() method:

/// <summary>
/// Factory method to create a (Geo)JsonSerializer
/// </summary>
/// <remarks>Calls <see cref="GeoJsonSerializer.CreateDefault()"/> internally</remarks>
/// <returns>A <see cref="JsonSerializer"/></returns>
public new static JsonSerializer Create()
{
    return CreateDefault();
}

Use of the direct constructor has been deprecated:

[Obsolete("Use GeoJsonSerializer.Create...() functions")]
public GeoJsonSerializer() : this(Wgs84Factory) { }

The code in the question should now work as expected.

---

Original Answer

Use the default constructor for the GeoJsonSerializer class:

var jsonSerializer = new NetTopologySuite.IO.GeoJsonSerializer();

That attaches a CoordinateConverter which prevents the problem.

GeoJsonSerializer does not actually have a static Create() method, so you are falling back on the base class's JsonSerializer.Create(). In fact the following would have resulted in a compiler error:

GeoJsonSerializer jsonSerializer = NTS.IO.GeoJsonSerializer.Create();