Cosmos: allow excluding null values from Json document

[aligunel]

When using

[JsonIgnore(Condition = JsonIgnoreCondition.WhenWritingNull)]
  [JsonPropertyName("age")]
  public int? Age { get; set; }

This still will create null when saving data in Cosmos Db

{
"age" : null
}

or is there anyway to prevent this ? This issue tracker is for documentation

For product issues, use https://github.com/aspnet/EntityFramework/issues

[ajcvickers]

@aligunel JsonIgnore is an attribute used by the JSon serializer; it does not change the EF model. NotMapped can be used to exclude a property from the EF model.

[aligunel]

@aligunel JsonIgnore is an attribute used by the JSon serializer; it does not change the EF model. NotMapped can be used to exclude a property from the EF model.

Problem is I want "age" in the cosmos db document if value only exists. [Notmapped] attribute will ignore it even there is a data for the field.

[ajcvickers]

@aligunel I don't think that is supported.

[aligunel]

I think EF COre 6 for Cosmos db is very immature. No support for JsonSerialization options. I need to define ToJsonProperty() for each property. It is not easy to integrate to existing cosmos db.

[AndriySvyryd]

Consider moving HasDefaultValue to Core. When querying it would be used for missing values and for null values if the property is not nullable. If not set then above scenarios should throw.

Consider adding SaveWhenNotDefault to PropertySaveBehavior. This won't send the value to the database if it's same as the specified default (or the CLR default if HasDefaultValue wasn't called). When specified for AfterSaveBehavior it will try to remove the value instead of updating to the default value when mapped to JSON.

[roji]

To continue @AndriySvyryd's comment above, we should carefully consider the interaction of this client-side default mechanism with the existing "sentinel value" mechanism we already have, which is about detecting when the user has set a property and when they haven't (e.g. for not sending a property to the database to allow it to get generated there).

Keep in mind that relational also has JSON mapping, where all of the same considerations apply as for non-relational JSON document databases.

/cc @damieng