Subtle breaking change when adding DbContextPool Entity Framework Core 6

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 09:29:35 +0000

During the upgrade process of one of our applications from .NET Core 3.1 to .NET 6.0, I stumbled across a very subtle breaking changing when using the AddDbContextPool() feature of EF Core. I thought it might be worthwhile to document this, in case someone else is troubled by it too.

Serializing Entity Framework objects to JSON in ASP.NET Web API

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 23:23:21 +0000

Recently, I’ve been playing a lot with ASP.NET Web API, as it is really an exciting technology. It works exceptionally well with JSON.NET (Henrik Nielsen wrote a great post on how to return JSON from ASP.NET Web API using JSON.NET).

However, as it’s been the case in the past with i.e. WCF, I’ve run into a issue with serializing Entity Framework object to JSON when returning them from the ApiController. This is not, by any means, an issue in ASP.NET Web API, as the problem in this case lies in the EF lazy loading, which causes circular reference between the objects. This then throws a corresponding error - “A circular reference was detected while serializing an object of type (…)” if you are using JavaScriptSerializer, “Self referencing loop detected for type (…)” if you are using JSON.NET and so on.

I thought it might be useful to remind about possible solutions to this. There is an easy workaround.

More after the jump.

Entity Framework on Strathweb. A free flowing tech monologue.

Subtle breaking change when adding DbContextPool Entity Framework Core 6

Serializing Entity Framework objects to JSON in ASP.NET Web API