Support decimal type

[xotahal]

Hello,

my model has decimal type and it isn't write as primitive type in JSON output. I was looking to code and there is method called CanWriteTypeAsPrimitive which returns false for decimal. Is it ok? It behaves similiar for Nullable<int>, Nullable<decimal>, etc.

[SphtKr]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Yes, that's the first place that will need a change, at least. The corresponding test in JSONAPI.Tests should also be updated. Then we'll have to see if the formatter will already handle Decimal or needs extra code to format it...hopefully not and it will just work. If you'd like to submit a pull request, please do!

I'm going to call this a bug as it's a bit of an obvious oversight. We can probably roll this and one other already done bugfix into a 0.2.2 release.

[SphtKr]

I created a branch for 0.2.2 bugfixes, so if you fork and do a PR, try to make the changes on that branch, or a new branch from this commit: 9259ae9

[SphtKr]

One more question, sorry...thinking about this, Decimal should probably be serialized to a string in the JSON, not a number (since serializing it to a JSON number could lose precision, and that's the point of Decimal). Is that what you would expect also?

[SphtKr]

Reopening so we can try and backport this to 0.2.2 (the milestone originally assigned)

[xotahal]

One more question, sorry...thinking about this, Decimal should probably be serialized to a string in the JSON, not a number (since serializing it to a JSON number could lose precision, and that's the point of Decimal). Is that what you would expect also?

Yes that's true. But I would like to serialize Decimal as number sometimes. There could be attribute:

[SerializeValueAs(SerializeValueAsOption.Number)]

What do you mean?

[SphtKr]

Yes, we've thought about exactly that kind of attribute solution.

@csantero has implemented string serialization of Decimal in master, which will become 0.3.0 soon, but we don't have the attribute to change serialization to a number yet. Something like that will probably wait for 0.4.0 at least, as we're trying to get 0.3.0 out. In the meantime, I think you could use a IContractResolver to change the serialization behavior.

[csantero]

I merged this fix back into the 0.2.2 branch. @SphtKr are you still planning to make a 0.2.2 release?