LLBLGen Pro and JSON serialization

I accidentally removed a reply from my previous blogpost, and as this blog-engine here at weblogs.asp.net is apparently falling apart, I can't re-add it as it thought it would be wise to disable comment controls on all posts, except new ones. So I'll post the reply here as a quote and reply on it.

'Steven' asks:

What would the future be for LLBLGen Pro to support JSON for serialization? Would it be worth the effort for a LLBLGenPro user to bother creating some code templates to produce additional JSON serializable classes?

Or just create some basic POCO classes which could be used for exchange of client/server data and use DTO to map these back to LLBGenPro ones? If I understand the work around, it is at the expense of losing xml serialization.

Well, as described in the previous post, to enable JSON serialization, you can do that with a couple of lines and some attribute assignments. However, indeed, the attributes might make the XML serialization not working, as described in the previous blogpost. This is the case if the service you're using serializes objects using the DataContract serializer: this serializer will give up to serialize the entity objects to XML as the entity objects implement IXmlSerializable and this is a no-go area for the DataContract serializer.

However, if your service doesn't use a DataContract serializer, or you serialize the objects manually to Xml using an xml serializer, you're fine.

When you want to switch to Xml serializing again, instead of JSON in WebApi, and you have decorated the entity classes with the data-contract attributes, you can switch off the DataContract serializer, by setting a global configuration setting:

var xml = GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Formatters.XmlFormatter;
xml.UseXmlSerializer = true;

This will make the WebApi use the XmlSerializer, and run the normal IXmlSerializable interface implementation.