Ignoring a field during .NET JSON serialization; similar to [XmlIgnore]?

Question

I have a POCO class that is being sent to the browser as a JSON string in .NET 3.5 sp1. I am just using the default JSON serialization and I have some fields that I want to

Answer 1

[ScriptIgnore] 

is your huckaberry.

Answer 2

You just need to add the [ScriptIgnore(ApplyToOverrides = true)] into your text template (.tt) file.

Here a portion of my text template before

#>
<#=codeStringGenerator.NavigationProperty(navigationProperty)#>
<#

Once I inserted the code the line above the codeStringGenerator my classes auto generated and looked like this:

[ScriptIgnore(ApplyToOverrides = true)]
public virtual ICollection<Currency> Currencies { get; set; }

I also needed to modify the UsingDirectives function to insert "using System.Web.Script.Serialization;"

Answer 3

I use the ScriptIgnore attribute on my model like so:

public class Item
{
    [ScriptIgnore]
    public Item ParentItem { get; set; }
}

In this particular scenario I was getting a circular reference error from the Json serializer, so I simply ignored it. I was asking a similar question here on SO when I was turned on to the difference between a Model and ViewModel.

Answer 4

Set property as internal. Depends on your structure, though. Take into consideration.