Serializing List<Person>

[shay99999]

Seems to be an issue with serialization of lists?

List persons = new List();
persons.Add(new Person(....
persons.Add(new Person(....

IEntitySerializer serializer = new EntitySerializer();
dynamic json = serializer.Serialize(persons);

Results in the following error: Object Serialized to Array. JObject instance expected.

Funnily enough seems to serialize a dictionary of persons ok though.

[tpluscode]

Oh, hi @shay99999. I don't know how it happened but I completely missed your report. Let me try to reproduce.

[tpluscode]

Okay, so obviously I never consider such usage of the serialiser and it expects input which will serialise to JSON object (JObject.FromObject()). A dictionary is handled as a JSON object because it is essentially a JS map and not an array.

I wouldn't want to overthink this at this point. Essentially JSON-LD can serialise arrays in two ways. First is a plain array, which prevents the use of a global @context

[
  {
    "@id": "http://example.com/resource"
  }
]

The second option enforces wrapping the array in a @graph object:

{
  "@context": {
    "@base": "http://example.com/"
  },
  "@graph": [
    {
      "@id": "resource"
    }
  ]
}

I'm pretty sure that for simplicity's sake I'd want to always do the latter and extend the entity serializer with a method JObject Serialize<TElement>(IEnumerable<TElement> entities, SerializationOptions options = null); This method will wrap the array in a @graph and apply the context for the element's type.
Could also be an extension.