Offer a way to override the way documents are serialized in json

[juchom]

Description
Currently when we send a document we use the internal JsonSerializerOptions JsonSerializerOptionsWriteNulls with this definition

internal static readonly JsonSerializerOptions JsonSerializerOptionsWriteNulls = new JsonSerializerOptions
{
    DefaultIgnoreCondition = JsonIgnoreCondition.Never,
    PropertyNamingPolicy = JsonNamingPolicy.CamelCase,
};

I actually don't like the default behaviour of this settings, it converts enum as int, I prefer to convert them as string.

Some people may not like the CamelCase and want some other settings.

Basic example

We should add an api call like SetGlobalJsonSerializerOptions or a ctor that accept one and make sure that the DefaultIgnoreCondition = JsonIgnoreCondition.Never other it will throws.

This test is very important because ignoring null values may lead to data losss for your customers.

If I'm correct in Constant.cs we have two JsonSerializerOptions :

JsonSerializerOptionsRemoveNulls this one is not supposed to be overridden, it is used for settings and match the api requirements.

JsonSerializerOptionsWriteNulls this one is only for documents and we may want to override the way we send documents to Meilisearch with the mandatory DefaultIgnoreCondition = JsonIgnoreCondition.Never.

What do you think of this ?

[alallema]

Hi @juchom,
Thank you for your suggestions always very accurate. I find this idea very interesting and it would be great to implement. Obviously, I am not an expert on Dotnet so I trust you completely 😊 on this 🚀

[juchom]

Actually, this is an interesting issue, in case other clients needs to do the same here are some side effects.

For exemple, let say we want to serialize our documents with PascalCase instead of camelCase and have our enum serialized as string.

We will use the following objects :

public class MovieWithEnum
{
    public int Id { get; set; }

    public string Name { get; set; }

    public MovieGenre Genre { get; set; }
}

public enum MovieGenre
{
    Action,
    Cartoon
}

Adding two movies will send this payload to Meilisearch :

var task = await index.AddDocumentsAsync(new[]
{
    new MovieWithEnum() { Id = 299537, Name = "Shazam!", Genre = MovieGenre.Action },
    new MovieWithEnum() { Id = 166428, Name = "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World", Genre = MovieGenre.Cartoon },
});

[
   {
      "Id":299537,
      "Name":"Shazam!",
      "Genre":"Action"
   },
   {
      "Id":166428,
      "Name":"How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World",
      "Genre":"Cartoon"
   }
]

This is perfect, we have PascalCase properties and our Genre as string.

Now if we try to get our documents :

var docs = await index.GetDocumentsAsync<MovieWithEnum>();

We will have this payload :

{
   "results":[
      {
         "Id":299537,
         "Name":"Shazam!",
         "Genre":"Action"
      },
      {
         "Id":166428,
         "Name":"How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World",
         "Genre":"Cartoon"
      }
   ],
   "offset":0,
   "limit":20,
   "total":2
}

We have Meilisearch fields : results, offset, limit, total in camelCase
And our object fields : Id, Name, Genre in PascalCase and with Genre enum serialized as string.

Our problem is that System.Text.Json will throw an exception because it is case sensitive because and it expects all fields to be PascalCase.

In order to have this working I'm going to decorate Meilisearch's objects with JsonPropertyName to force the serializer to respect the response of the server whatever the options we use for our documents.

[xamir82]

This is pretty essential actually. I'm surprised to find out it's not already supported. Especially, now that JSON serialization/deserialization source generators are becoming more and more prevalent, this is an increasingly pressing issue.
@ahmednfwela Sorry for pinging you, do you have any time to implement this by any chance? That would be greatly appreciated.

[mayrmax]

As far as i see the only thing that needs to be adapted is to make the class public to allow overwriting?
Or am i missing something?