使用WebAPI和实体框架通过JSON发送和接收不同的模型

Question

I'm very new to entity framework and web api so please excuse me if what I'm trying to do doesn't make much sense! Is it possible to send one model on a post and receive a different model on a get? My example.

I have a very simple companies model:

  public class Company
    {
        [Required]
        public string companyName { get; set; }
        public virtual List<Branch> branches { get; set; }
    }

 public class Branch
    {
        public int companyID { get; set; }
        public string branchName { get; set; }
        public string address { get; set; }
        public string postcode { get; set;}
        public string phoneNumber { get; set; }
        public virtual Company company { get; set; }
    }

When I post to myapp/api/companies I want to be able to include a list of branches to add alongside the company, this is currently working perfectly however, my front end designer has requested that the companies come back without the branches attached. I have tried [jsonIgnore] against the branches and this works for the GET but it also stops the branches from writing on a post. Is there some way to apply the jsonIgnore on the controller perhaps?

Should I try and convince my front-end guy to just ignore the branch data or is there some way I could omit it in the response?

Thanks

Chris

Answer 1

The way I finally managed to do this was to use eager loading instead of lazy loading. To achieve that remove virtual from each of the relations. This stops EF from getting the relations automatically then in any code that returns the object use .Include() to include any relations you want back in that return.