ServiceStack: Can I "Flatten" the structure of the post body?
I have a POST endpoint that takes a URL path param and then the body is a list of submitted DTOs.
So right now the request DTO looks something along the lines of:
[Route("/prefix/{Param1}", "POST")]
public class SomeRequest
{
public string Param1 { get; set; }
public List<SomeEntry> Entries { get; set; }
}
public class SomeEntry
{
public int ID { get; set; }
public int Type { get; set; }
public string Value { get; set; }
}
And the service method looks something like:
public class SomeService : Service
{
public SomeResponse Post(SomeRequest request)
{
}
}
If encoded via JSON, the client would have to encode the POST body this way:
{
"Entries":
[
{
"id": 1
"type": 42
"value": "Y"
},
...
]
}
This is redundant, I would like the client to submit the data like this:
[
{
"id": 1
"type": 42
"value": "Y"
},
...
]
Which would have been the case if my request DTO was simply List<SomeEntry>
My questions is: is there a way to "flatten" the request this way? Or designate one property of the request as the root of the message body? ie perhaps:
[Route("/prefix/{Param1}", "POST")]
public class SomeRequest
{
public string Param1 { get; set; }
[MessageBody]
public List<SomeEntry> Entries { get; set; }
}
Is this doable in any way in ServiceStack?
I was able to sort of get this to sort of work by subclassing List<T> :
[Route("/prefix/{Param1}", "POST")]
public class SomeRequest : List<SomeEntry>
{
public string Param1 { get; set; }
}
Then you can send a request like this:
POST /prefix/someParameterValue
Content-Type: application/json
[ { "ID": 1, "Type": 2, "Value": "X" }, ... ]
But if you have any choice in the design, I wouldn't recommend this. Here's a couple of reasons to start with:
[ ] in JSON, is resulting in a 400 status code with RequestBindingException OK I've managed to achieve this. Not the prettiest solution but will do for now.
I wrapped the content type filter for JSON:
var serz = ContentTypeFilters.GetResponseSerializer("application/json");
var deserz = ContentTypeFilters.GetStreamDeserializer("application/json");
ContentTypeFilters.Register("application/json", serz, (type, stream) => MessageBodyPropertyFilter(type, stream, deserz));
Then the custom deserializer looks like this:
private object MessageBodyPropertyFilter(Type type, Stream stream, StreamDeserializerDelegate original)
{
PropertyInfo prop;
if (_messageBodyPropertyMap.TryGetValue(type, out prop))
{
var requestDto = type.CreateInstance();
prop.SetValue(requestDto, original(prop.PropertyType, stream), null);
return requestDto;
}
else
{
return original(type, stream);
}
}
_messageBodyPropertyMap is populated after init by scanning the request DTOs and looking for a certain attribute, as in the example in my original question.