Emit odata.type field with DataContractJsonSerializer? - json

Question

Is there a way to make DataContractJsonSerializer emit the "odata.type" field required when posting an OData entity into a collection that supports multiple entity types (hierarchy per table)?
If I construct DataContractJsonSerializer with a settings object with EmitTypeInformation set to Always, it emits a "__type" field in the output, but that's not the field name needed for OData and the format of the value is wrong as well.
Is there any way to hook into the DataContractJsonSerializer pipeline to inject the desired "odata.type" field into the serialization output?
It would be such a hack to have to parse the serialization output in order to inject the field. How does WCF Data Services do it? Not using DataContractJsonSerializer is my guess.

Answer 1

Have you considered using Json.Net? Json.Net is much more extensible and the scenario that you have can be done using a custom resolver. sample code
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine(
JsonConvert.SerializeObject(new Customer { Name = "Raghu" }, new JsonSerializerSettings
{
ContractResolver = new CustomContractResolver()
}));
}
}
public class CustomContractResolver : DefaultContractResolver
{
protected override JsonObjectContract CreateObjectContract(Type objectType)
{
JsonObjectContract objectContract = base.CreateObjectContract(objectType);
objectContract.Properties.Add(new JsonProperty
{
PropertyName = "odata.type",
PropertyType = typeof(string),
ValueProvider = new StaticValueProvider(objectType.FullName),
Readable = true
});
return objectContract;
}
private class StaticValueProvider : IValueProvider
{
private readonly object _value;
public StaticValueProvider(object value)
{
_value = value;
}
public object GetValue(object target)
{
return _value;
}
public void SetValue(object target, object value)
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
}
public class Customer
{
public string Name { get; set; }
}

Answer 2

I can't answer your first two questions, but for the third question, I found on the OData Team blog a link to the OData WCF Data Services V4 library open source code. Downloading that code, you will see that they perform all serialization and deserialization manually. They have 68 files in their two Json folders! And looking through the code they have comments such as:
// This is a work around, needTypeOnWire always = true for client side:
// ClientEdmModel's reflection can't know a property is open type even if it is, so here
// make client side always write 'odata.type' for enum.
So that to me kind of implies there is no easy, clean, simple, elegant way to do it.
I tried using a JavaScriptConverter, a dynamic type, and other stuff, but most of them ended up resorting to using Reflection which just made for a much more complicated solution versus just using a string manipulation approach.