Why are values null when I add the Serializable attribute?

Question

I have a WebAPI 2, and I am trying to Post a model to one of the methods.

My full Postman request looks like this:

POST http://localhost:58900/api/v1/test HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:58900
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Length: 295
Authorization: Bearer <<my bearer token>>
Postman-Token: 970cb0c1-3a8c-7a1e-763a-7dd916c035f3
Cache-Control: no-cache
Origin: chrome-extension://fhbjgbiflinjbdggehcddcbncdddomop
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/51.0.2704.103 Safari/537.36
Content-Type: application/json
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8,sv;q=0.6,fr;q=0.4

{
    MyProperty: 'Test',
    MyGuid: '67345ac2-551e-d16e-b448-e697e369dea1'
}

My controller method looks like this:

[HttpPost]
public IHttpActionResult Post([FromBody]MyModel myModel)
{
    //Doing stuff
}

Everything works as expected but when I add the Serializable attribute to my model all values become null, as such:

[Serializable]
public class MyModel
{
    public string MyProperty { get; set; }
    public Guid MyGuid { get; set; }
}

[HttpPost]
public IHttpActionResult Post([FromBody]MyModel myModel)
{
    //myModel.MyProperty is null and myModel.MyGuid is {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
}

I assume(?) that this is because the Serialization attribute is telling the runtime to use a binary formatter instead of the JsonFormatter specified in my configuration - but then, what is the best way to work around this?

The reason I need the Serialization attribute in the first place is to allow deep copy of the objects;

public static List<T> Clone<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list)
{
    var ms = new MemoryStream();
    var bf = new BinaryFormatter();
    bf.Serialize(ms, list);
    ms.Position = 0;
    return bf.Deserialize(ms) as List<T>;
}

Do you mean instead of [Serializable]? That will not work, the Clone method will fail to serialize the objects without [Serializable]. — Marcus
– Marcus, Commented Jul 13, 2016 at 9:14
Add it as an attribute, between [Serializable] and MyModel. stackoverflow.com/questions/29962044/… — Petre T
– Petre T, Commented Jul 13, 2016 at 9:18
Great, that works, but I managed to solve it by changing the Clone method to CloneJson and use the JsonConvert class to deep copy the object instead.. not sure which is the best approach. Post your response as an answer please! — Marcus
– Marcus, Commented Jul 13, 2016 at 9:22

Marcus · Accepted Answer · 2016-07-13 09:25:55Z

0

Posting my own alternative answer;

One possible solution is to change the deep copy method Clone and use JsonConvert to copy the object instead, this will make it possible to remove the [Serializable] attribute from the model class;

public static T CloneJson<T>(this T source)
{
    if (ReferenceEquals(source, null)) return default(T);
    var deserializeSettings = new JsonSerializerSettings { ObjectCreationHandling = ObjectCreationHandling.Replace };
    return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<T>(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(source), deserializeSettings);
}

answered Jul 13, 2016 at 9:25

Marcus

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