Handling MongoDB's ISODate() when attempting to parse a serialized JSON string

Question

I'm using MongoDB via the official C# driver with an ASP.NET MVC web site.

I have the following C# model:

public class Contact

{

    public ObjectId Id { get; set; }

    public string Name { get; set; }

    public DateTime DateAdded { get; set; }

}

Which, when pulled from MongoDB and serialized into a JSON string via MVC looks like:

{

    "_id"  : ObjectId("52eaad4839b60812fca4bf28"),

    "Name": "Joe Blow",

    "DateAdded" : ISODate("2014-01-30T19:51:35.977Z")

}

When I attempt to convert this from a JSON string to a Javascript object on the browser via JSON.parse(), I get the following error:

Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected token I

This is because

ISODate(...)

is not valid JSON

ObjectId()

is also not valid JSON, but the way I'm handling that is to simply perform a

string.replace()

on the JSON string prior to parsing it on the client. I considered doing the same for

ISODate()

but it feels a little too hacky.

Is there something I can do without resorting to regular expressions on the client side? Perhaps something from the MongoDB driver?

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Answer 1

I think you need to tweak your JSON serializer a bit more. Try this:

var jsonWriterSettings = new JsonWriterSettings { OutputMode = JsonOutputMode.Strict };
Console.WriteLine(document.ToJson(jsonWriterSettings));

Handling MongoDB's ISODate() when attempting to parse a serialized JSON string

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