Prevent serializing default values with ServiceStack Json
Some of my contracts have quite a few int / decimal / short / byte etc. properties that often have default values.
I don't want to serialize these properties if they are the default, as it ends up taking up quite a bit of bandwidth and in my situation these extra bytes matter. It also makes reading the logs more effort as these defaults are serialized, creating a lot of unnecessary noise.
I know you can use JsConfig.SerializeFn and RawSerializeFn to return null in this situation, but that will also affect the list, which is not desired.
JsConfig<int>.SerializeFn = value => value == 0 ? null : value.ToString();
Is there any other way to prevent these values from being serialized?
One alternative I can think of is to use nullable types (like int?) Instead and set them to null rather than 0 to prevent serialization, but that would involve changing a large number of contracts ...
Another option is to drop the ServiceStack for json serialization and use Json.NET which supports this out of the box: http://www.newtonsoft.com/json/help/html/T_Newtonsoft_Json_DefaultValueHandling.htm
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You can use values with a null value, for example int?
, in which case the values null
will not be selected by default.
You can suppress the defaults by annotating individual properties with [DataMember(EmitDefaultValue = false)]
, for example:
[DataContract]
public class Poco
{
[DataMember(EmitDefaultValue = false)]
public int DontEmitDefaultValue { get; set; }
}
Finally, I just added support for excluding default values globally:
JsConfig.ExcludeDefaultValues = true;
Where suppresses serialization of default values.
This feature is available from v4.0.41 + , which is now available in MyGet .
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