JsonAot

Json serialization solution for assembled-on-time publishing in .NET 8.0

JsonAot is a lightweight utility designed to automate source generation code for your classes. If you are trying to refactor or migrate your code into an AOT compliant format, you may find several Json serialization packages are not entirely AOT compliant and will break code, which will lead you to consider using System.Text.Json. Rather than deal with the headache of implementing a huge deal of refactoring, you can simply add the attribute [JsonAot] to your classes that you intend to serialize or deserialize and JsonAot will handle the rest. Here's how:

1. Run JsonAot -setup Running JsonAot with the -setup parameter in your project's root directory will create the JSONHandler.cs template file. Optionally you can add the -s arg during setup, `JsonAot -setup -s' and your 'Program.cs' file will be automatically updated with the necessary including statement.

Note: Manually add your project's namespace into the JSONHandler.cs file so it can access class references!

2. Implement functions JSONHandler.cs has two built in functions which provide a very familiar syntax with Newtonsoft's and System.Text.Json's conversion syntax. Implement these function for your project's serialization and deserialization, and be sure to tag all classes that will be passed to these function with [JsonAot]

[JsonAot]
public class MessageExample{
    public string Message {get; set; };
    public int ID {get; set;}
} // the attribute will tell JsonAot this class will be serialized

3. Run JsonAot -run Once all of your classes have been properly tagged with the JsonAot attribute, run JsonAot -run in the project root directory. A scan will be conducted of all *.cs project files, the proper classes identified, and JSONHandler.cs will be updated automatically with appropriate source code.

And there you go, your Json serialization will work within the confines of an AOT binary!

Function usage

If there are no project-specific constraints, it is advised to use the following includes:

global using static JSONHandler.JSONHandler;
global using JSONHandler;

This will make conversion much more functional and easy to implement throughout your application. See below for examples of the built-in serialization functions.

Serialization:

MessageExample newmessage = new MessageExample(){
    Message = "Hello!",
    ID = 1000
};
string serialized_object = Serialize<MessageExample>(newmessage);

Deserialization:

MessageExample deserializedmessage = Deserialize<MessageExample>(serialized_object);

Note: JsonAot is meant to be ran as a binary in the project root, it is not a working NuGet package. Download and compile the binary, or check the release for a current working download.

^{If you don't want to compile it yourself, there's a working x64 release}