Handling enums in JSON

When I serialize an object of a class with a enum property to JSON, if the value is null, the resulting json string has a name value pair like this:

"controlType":"-2147483648"

This causes issues when I deserialize the string to a strongly typed object.

What's the best way of handling enums and nulls?

From stackoverflow

• Consider:

  echo json_encode(array("test"=>null));
  

  This produces:

  {"test":null}
  

  The best way to handle enums is with a key,value array or an stdClass. Just bind your names to a set of unique integers. You can then bind the other direction as well:

  {"A":1, "B":2, "C":3, 1:"A", 2:"B", 3:"C"}

  This at least gives you bi-directionality.

• the below code gives you json = '{"Name":"Test","Id":1,"MyEnum":3}', when you have a non-null value.

       public enum SerializeObjTestClassEnum
   {
    one = 1, two, three, four
   }
  
   [Serializable]
   public class SerializeObjTestClass
   {
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public SerializeObjTestClassEnum MyEnum{ get; set; }
   }
  
   public void SerializeObject_Test_Basic_Object()
   {
    var obj = new SerializeObjTestClass { Id = 1, Name = "Test", MyEnum = SerializeObjTestClassEnum.three };
    var json = (new JavaScriptSerializer()).Serialize(obj);
   }
  

  ---

  this code gives you json = '{"Name":"Test","Id":1,"MyEnum":0}'

      var obj = new SerializeObjTestClass { Id = 1, Name = "Test" };
  

  Notice how the enum, when not set, is serialized to a 0, while the enum itself starts out at 1. So this is how you code can know a NULL value was used for the enum.

  if you want the json to look like '{"Name":"Test","Id":1,"MyEnum":null}', then you're going to need to fake it out by using a class wrapper around the Enum.

  dbkk : The wrapper `is Nullable`, replace `MyEnum` with `MyEnum?`.