Removing/Hiding/Deleting a field from class when deserialising

Question

I have a class - say Place

public class Place{
    public int id;
    public string name;
    public string slug;
}

There are other classes like City, State, Country which are derived from Place class.

I get an XML string like this, that has array of cities

<cities>
 <City>
  <name>
   <![CDATA[Mumbai]]>
  </name>
  <slug>
   <![CDATA[mumbai]]>
  </slug>
 </City>
<City>
  <name>
   <![CDATA[Thane]]>
  </name>
  <slug>
   <![CDATA[thane]]>
  </slug>
 </City>
</cities>

I deserialize this string in the city array and send to Angular UI.

On the frontend, there is no use of id field. But since it is part of class, the empty/null id field also gets deserialize. I can remove the id field from the class, but it is used in other functions so I cannot do that. I don't want to use XmlIgnore attribute because some one might have already used this field in other functions.

My question is, is there a way to remove the id field before sending it forward?

return Serializer.DeserializeXml<Cities>(_strCities);

Possible duplicate of [Ignoring a property during deserialization](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1198910/ignoring-a-property-during-deserialization) — devqon, Jan 17 '17 at 14:45
But it should not ignore the field in other functions where it may be deserialized and still required. — Dhanashree, Jan 17 '17 at 14:47
Then how about [this one](http://stackoverflow.com/a/18242538/3153169)? — devqon, Jan 17 '17 at 14:50
Yes, I think this is it. I will try it and confirm. Thanks!! — Dhanashree, Jan 17 '17 at 15:01
My Serializer is custom class that internally uses XmlSerializer :( my bad. — Dhanashree, Jan 17 '17 at 15:08
Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/133372/discussion-between-dhanashree-and-devqon). — Dhanashree, Jan 17 '17 at 15:31

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 17 '17 at 14:56

0

You can use [XmlIgnore] and [ScriptIgnore] attributes above property

[XmlIgnore]
[ScriptIgnore]
public int intvar{get;set;}

answered Jan 17 '17 at 14:56

kgzdev

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 18 '17 at 09:36

The solution was quite simple. I had to add another function - ShouldSerializePropertyName. The function will return true or false and depending on the result the id will be serialized or deserialized :)

public bool ShouldSerializeid()
        {
            return !(id.Equals(string.Empty)|| id.Equals(0));
        }

I found this explanation on MSDN -

ShouldSerialize and Reset are optional methods that you can provide for a property, if the property does not a have simple default value. If the property has a simple default value, you should apply the DefaultValueAttribute and supply the default value to the attribute class constructor instead.

Removing/Hiding/Deleting a field from class when deserialising

2 Answers2