How to serialize class type but not the namespace to a Json string using DataContractJsonSerializer

Question

I\'m trying to serialize a class hierarchy to a Json string using DataContractJsonSerializer, in a WCF service. the default behaviour for serializing a derived clas

Answer 1

Cheeso's answer was excellent. I did discover a refinement to cleaning up the __type field though:

Rather than removing your subclass from its namespace you can add a property like the following:

[DataMember(Name = "__type")]
public string SubclassType
{
    get
    {
        return "Subscriber";
    }
    set { }
}

You still get stuck with the ugly name "__type" but I found that because I was returning a list of subtypes I wanted to specify the type name anyway. You could even return a value of "" to further reduce response size. You could also just declare the property as:

public string __type

but I found that to accentuate the hack so I stuck with an appropriate property name and then renamed it.

-Joey