Is there @JsonView equivalent in ASP.NET Web API

Question

I have much more experience in Spring and Java, but now I am working on ASP.NET Web API project.

So in Spring there is @JsonView annotation with which I can annotate my DTOs, so I could select which data I will show through REST. And I find that very useful. But I cannot find any equivalent in ASP.NET. So I would need to create DTO for every special usecase.

So for example in Java if I have UserEntity that contains information about users. Some information can be seen publicly and some can be seen only by admins. The siple solution could be this

public class UserEntity {
  @JsonView(Views.Public.class)
  @JsonProperty("ID")
  private Integer id;

  @JsonView(Views.Public.class)
  private String name;

  @JsonView(Views.Admin.class)
  @JsonFormat(
  shape = JsonFormat.Shape.STRING, 
  pattern = "dd-MM-yyyy hh:mm:ss")
  private Date dateOfBirth;

  @JsonView(Views.Admin.class)
  private String email;

  @JsonIgnore
  private String password;
  private Integer version;
}

So in this case for equivalent functionality in ASP.NET I would need to create 2 DTOs. One for user that can be seen publicly and one for user that can be seen only by admin.

public class PublicUserDto {

  public int ID {get; set;}

  public String Name {get; set;}

}

public class AdminUserDto {

  public int ID {get; set;}

  public String Name {get; set;}

  public DateTime DateOfBirth {get; set;}

  public string Email {get; set;}
}

Is there any better solution? Is there some mechanism that I can use to create view over my data in ASP.NET Web API?

Answer 1

JSON.NET has something called Conditional Property Initialization. You can write a method with the following format:

public bool ShouldSerialize[YourPropertyName]() => someBoolCondition;

JSON.NET will call that method to determine if that property should be serialized or not. So you could have something like:

public DateTime DateOfBirth {get; set;}

public bool ShouldSerializeDateOfBirth() => isAdmin;

It's not as pretty as JsonView but it should do the job.