ef4 cause Circular reference in web service

Question

I have a Reason object:

public class Reason
{
    public virtual long Id { get; set; }
    public virtual string Name { get; set; }
    public virtual Comp         


        

Answer 1

You haven't supplied the definition for your company class.... But I'm guessing you have a collection of Reason as a property.

Lazy loading in an SOA Enviroment doesn't really work. You can't have unlimited lazy navigation over a serialized class, once you leave the webmethod you have no way to call back into the original datacontext from the webmethod consumer to lookup the properites... so the serializer will try and visit all properties, including lazy properties at the time of serialization.

You need to disable serialization on one part of the circular reference, either on the Reason collection in Company class, or the Company in Reason class.

You can use the "NotSerialized" attribute to disable serialization of a particular field.