👀 Views: 25 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-11

aspnet-core ef-core json C#

I'm testing a new approach and Could someone explain I recently switched to I've tried everything I can think of but I'm currently building an ASP.NET Core web application using Entity Framework Core 6..... I have two entities, `Author` and `Book`, which have a bi-directional relationship where an `Author` can have multiple `Books`, and each `Book` references its `Author`. The scenario arises when I try to serialize a list of `Authors` to JSON; I get a `StackOverflowException` due to circular references. 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; } } ``` When I use the default JSON serializer (System.Text.Json) in my controller action to return the list of authors, I encounter this behavior: ``` Unhandled exception. System.StackOverflowException: The operation has timed out. ``` I tried to resolve this by adding the `[JsonIgnore]` attribute to the `Books` property in the `Author` class, which worked for avoiding the exception, but now the `Books` list is not included in the serialized output, which is not what I want. I also considered using DTOs (Data Transfer Objects) to flatten the data structure, but I feel that may complicate the overall design. What would be the best practice to handle this situation without losing the data I need in the JSON response while avoiding the circular reference? Is using DTOs a common approach, or is there a more straightforward solution in EF Core? Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated! Has anyone else encountered this? I've been using C# for about a year now. Has anyone dealt with something similar? I'm developing on Windows 10 with C#. Has anyone else encountered this? The stack includes C# and several other technologies.