With Newtonsoft.Json you can:

JsonConvert.SerializeObject(Umbraco.Content(id))

But i have done this in the past and it often crashes as the IPublishedContent object is so large, i would advise mapping the IPublishedContent item to a custom model manually or using models builder, and then serialise that model instead.

Hi Sandra,

Best to use the UmbracoApiController class to manage a transformation of IPublishedContent as the object is too complex for JSON deserialization. You can map it to a less complex object and expose it through the controller. The controller already has access to the Umbraco Helper class which will allow you to do things link query IPC.

Look at the documentation here:

https://our.umbraco.com/documentation/Reference/Routing/WebApi/

Good luck,

Steve

Thank you very much for your answers, they were really helpful. You all have a nice day , Sandra

Hi,

I'm just trying to implement this technique but from what I can see I'm serializing twice.

public class MyController : UmbracoApiController
{
    //GET: 
    public String GetAllThings()
    {       
        var thingsList = Umbraco.ContentSingleAtXPath("//thingsRoot").Children;

        var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings
        {
            ContractResolver = new PublishedContentContractResolver()
        };
        var serialized = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(thingsList, Formatting.Indented, settings);

        return serialized;
    }
}

This is giving me an output in Postman with all the escape characters showing in one big long string:

"[\r\n  {\r\n    \"Area\": 1,\r\n    \"Some_Id\": 3,\r\n    \"Column\": 1,\r\n    \"Common_Name\": \"Some name\",\r\n    etc.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Craig

Thanks Lee,

I'm afraid that resulted in :-

"Message": "An error has occurred.", "ExceptionMessage": "The 'ObjectContent`1' type failed to serialize the response body for content type 'application/json; charset=utf-8'.", "ExceptionType": "System.InvalidOperationException", "StackTrace": null, "InnerException": {
    "Message": "An error has occurred.",
    "ExceptionMessage": "Self referencing loop detected for property 'ContentType' with type 'Umbraco.Core.Models.PublishedContent.PublishedContentType'. Path 'Data[0].ContentType.PropertyTypes[0]'.",
    "ExceptionType": "Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializationException",

As I understand it UmbracoApiController attempts it's own JSON serialisation on return. So it appears it was doing it twice on my string and now it appears to be doing it twice at the same time. Or I may have misunderstood of course.

Yes, that's the one.

Funny thing is, it didn't baulk when I returned a string. So that gives me the impression the PublishedContentContractResolver is probably working. However, the UmbracoApiController's default serialisation attempt is probably the one that's blowing, which is why I was hoping to deserialise the PublishedContentContractResolver result back to a string before the UmbracoApiController did it's thing.

As I understand it, this only needs doing to stop certain IPC properties from being serialised.

I agree, it's a PITA. It would be a very elegant solution if you could just call your content and have it sent out as Json. Sounds simple, but..... ;)

BINGO!

I thought I'd tried that earlier but obviously not well enough, lol

That outputs perfectly now.

Thanks very much :)

So for anyone else in this predicament, the final code was:-

public class MyController : UmbracoApiController
{
    //GET: 
    public Object GetAllThings()
    {       
        var thingsList = Umbraco.ContentSingleAtXPath("//thingsRoot").Children;

        var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings
        {
            ContractResolver = new PublishedContentContractResolver()
        };
        var serialized = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(thingsList, Formatting.Indented, settings);

        return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(serialized);
    }
}

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