IsReference property in data contract
What is the purpose of IsReference
property in DataContract
? How does the request and response vary with this property applied?
Solution 1:
It determines how objects are serialized, by default, IsReference=false
.
Setting IsReference = true
allows the serialization of trees of objects that can reference each other. So with a list of Employees
that each have a property for Manager
(who is also an Employee
), a reference to the Manager
for each Employee
can be held rather than embedding the Manager
within each Employee
node:
IsReference=false
would produce:
<Employee>
<Manager i:nil=“true“ />
<Name>Kenny</Name>
</Employee>
<Employee>
<Manager>
<Manager i:nil=“true“ />
<Name>Kenny</Name>
</Manager>
<Name>Bob</Name>
</Employee>
<Employee>
<Manager>
<Manager i:nil=“true“ />
<Name>Kenny</Name>
</Manager>
<Name>Alice</Name>
</Employee>
Where as IsReference=true
would produce:
<Employee z:Id=“i1“ xmlns:z=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/“>
<Manager i:nil=“true“ />
<Name>Kenny</Name>
</Employee>
<Employee z:Id=“i2“ xmlns:z=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/“>
<Manager z:Ref=“i1“ />
<Name>Bob</Name>
</Employee>
<Employee z:Id=“i3“ xmlns:z=“http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/“>
<Manager z:Ref=“i1“ />
<Name>Alice</Name>
</Employee>
Snippets taken from this weblog that has a full explanation along with examples of the generated XML with the property applied.
MSDN - IsReference Property provides details as well as Interoperable Object References.
Solution 2:
Also IsReference
does not exist in .NET Framework 3.5. So you could get errors when using it with that Framework version - it only exists in 4.5, 4, 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight.
"Error 297 'System.Runtime.Serialization.DataContractAttribute' does not contain a definition for 'IsReference' "