Is there an alternative for ShouldSerialize[PropertyName] in C#?

Question

I have been writing a lot of code lately which involves serialization using Json.NET and due to the nature of the data that I serialize, sometimes not all of their properties need to be serialized so, I do as follows...

public int Foo { get; set; }

public bool ShouldSerializeFoo() => Foo > -1;

This's good and works but involves a lot of work if you have many properties (in my case I have over 100).

So, I wanted to know if there's an alternative to writing those methods.

Answer 1

One alternative option is to specific a [DefaultValue(...)] and use the DefaultValueHandling.Ignore feature:

[DefaultValue(-1), JsonProperty(DefaultValueHandling = DefaultValueHandling.Ignore)]
public int Foo { get; set; } = -1;

Note that it is important to initialize the value to the default value - hence the = -1; in the property initializer.