managing property names returned in json from web api

Question

I am currently working with ASP.NET web api where I return a Model object like following from my REST operation:

Product with properties: Name, Id, Description, etc.....

When this is converted to a JSON object, it outputs it with property names above.

To cut down the payload returned from the web api operation, is there any way I can change the properties in the JSON object like for example Desc for Description. I could change the Model object but the property names would not make sense then!

Answer 1

The easy way to do this is through a data contract. Here is an article, but basically, it involves two annotations on your model. It also allows you to ignore anything you don't want serialized.

[DataContract]
public class Foo {  //Your model class

   [DataMember(Name="bar-none")]  //This also allows you to use chars like '-'
   public string bar {get; set;}

   [IgnoreDataMember]  //Don't serialize this one
   public List<string> fuzz { get; set;}

}

Answer 2

You could also consider using http://automapper.org/ on the asp.net side to map your full objects, to more lightweight ones. Might be overkill for just one or two small objects, but if you have a bunch to do this can save you some time (free and open source to boot).