Handling Circular References in Entity Framework Core 5.0 with JSON Serialization
I've looked through the documentation and I'm still confused about I've been working on this all day and I keep running into I'm deploying to production and I'm working with an scenario while trying to serialize an entity that has circular references using Entity Framework Core 5.0..... Specifically, I have two entities, `Author` and `Book`, where an `Author` can have multiple `Books`, and each `Book` has a reference back to its `Author`. When I attempt to serialize an `Author` object to JSON using `System.Text.Json`, I encounter a `JsonException` stating: "A circular reference was detected while serializing an object of type 'MyNamespace.Author'." I've tried disabling reference handling in the serialization options, but that does not seem to address the scenario. Here's a simplified version of my entities: ```csharp public class Author { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public ICollection<Book> Books { get; set; } } public class Book { public int Id { get; set; } public string Title { get; set; } public Author Author { get; set; } } ``` To serialize the `Author` object, I'm using the following code: ```csharp var author = await _context.Authors.Include(a => a.Books).FirstOrDefaultAsync(a => a.Id == 1); var jsonOptions = new JsonSerializerOptions { ReferenceHandler = ReferenceHandler.Preserve }; string json = JsonSerializer.Serialize(author, jsonOptions); ``` Despite setting the `ReferenceHandler`, I still receive the circular reference behavior. I am aware that `Newtonsoft.Json` handles circular references more gracefully, but I would prefer to stick with `System.Text.Json` for performance reasons. What steps can I take to resolve this scenario and successfully serialize my `Author` entities without running into circular reference errors? Could this be a known issue? I'm on CentOS using the latest version of C#. I'd be grateful for any help. The stack includes C# and several other technologies. Thanks for any help you can provide!