Question 262802 in ASP.NET Question posted in
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Asp.net – How to handle both 0/1 and false/true values for booleans in requestbody

I’m currently migrating functionalities from an old HTTP API to a new HTTP API.
Several endpoints of the api expect objects with nullable boolean values as a JSON object in the requestbody.

Modelcode:

public class StatusRequest
{
    public bool? Status {get; set;}
}

Controller:

[HttpPost, Route("")]
public async Task<IActionResult> RequestStatus([FromBody] StatusRequest requestData )
{
    if(requestData.Status)
    {
        return Ok();
    }
    else
    { 
        return BadRequest(); 
    }
}

My problem is now that since I’m migrating from an old API that used 0/1 integers as boolean values and we want the neccessary changes on the userside to be as minimal as possible, the API should be able to read both 0/1 and false/true for the properties in the requestbody.

First I tried to implement a custom model binding class implementing IModelBinder, that handles the 0/1 and the nullable values but the binding was ignored due to the [FromBody] attribute. I can’t remove the [FromBody] attribute though, because then our swagger documentation displays the requestmodel as individual parameters and not as a single requestbody. I also can’t add examples of requestbodies to the documentation because the OpenApiOperation class doesn’t have a RequestBody property anymore.

Is there a way I can handle my nullable and integer values and still have a correct documentation?

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. 0

    All you need to do is to declare a JsonConverter. make sure that your API is using NewtonsoftJson for handling api json serialization/deserialization. then you should create a custom JsonConverter which derives from Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConverter and handles boolean fields.

    Then you need to add the convertor that you made to newtonsoftJson SerializerSettings in your Program.cs like so:

    builder.Services.AddControllers()
    .AddNewtonsoftJson(options => {
        options.SerializerSettings.Converters.Add(new BoolJsonConverter());
    });

    If you want to know how you can declare a BoolJsonConverter you can take a look at How do I get Newtonsoft to serialize a bool as false, not False or "false".

    Let us know if it could help you solve your problem.

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  2. 0

    Another possible solution is creating multiple DTOs as [body] inputs on the same endpoint, like so

    public class StatusRequest1
{
    public bool Status {get; set;}
}

public class StatusRequest2
{
    public int Status {get; set;}
}

    And your controller would be like this:

    [HttpPost, Route("")]
public async Task<IActionResult> RequestStatus([FromBody] StatusRequest1 requestData )
{
    ...   
}

[HttpPost, Route("")]
public async Task<IActionResult> RequestStatus([FromBody] StatusRequest2 requestData )
{
    ...
}

    After that you can parse the int value back to bool. and the API client can call this endpoint with both int and bool values.

    BUT if your only concern is the 1/0 and true/false values and not the data Types, you can declare it as public string Status {get; set;} and parse its value to bool inside your model.

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