How did I solve the Json serializing circular reference error?

Question

There is post here that asks how to solve the circular reference error when returning a serialized object via EF4 CTP5. I ran into this same problem with a WCF web forms pr

Answer 1

The circular reference happens because you use eager loading on the object.

You have a couple of methods:

• Turn off eager loading when your loading your Query (linq or lambda) DbContext.Configuration.ProxyCreationEnabled = false;
• Remove the virtual keyword from the Domainmodel
• Include them while loading the objects
• Detach the objects (= no eager loading functionality & no proxy)
  • Repository.Detach(entityObject)
  • DbContext.Entry(entityObject).EntityState = EntityState.Detached
• Clone the properties
  • You could use something like AutoMapper to clone the object, don't use the ICloneable interface, because it also clones the ProxyProperties in the object, so that won't work.
• In case you are building an API, try using a separte project with a different configuration (that doesn't return proxies)

PS. Proxies is the object that's created by EF when you load it from the Entity Framework. In short: It means that it holds the original values and updated values so they can be updated later. It handles other things to ;-)