[TINKERPOP-1696] gremlin-dotnet: GraphSONReader third-party type exposed

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Open
• Priority: Minor
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Affects Version/s: 3.3.0
• Component/s: dotnet
• Labels: breaking
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Jorge Bay
• Created: 21/Jun/17 15:59
• Updated: 30/May/18 20:32

Description

On gremlin-dotnet, the GraphSONReader public class and IGraphSONDeserializer public interface uses JToken as a parameter, which is a type defined in the third-party library Newtonsoft's Json.NET.

public class GraphSONReader {
  public dynamic ToObject(JToken jToken) {
    // ... implementation
  }
}

public interface IGraphSONDeserializer {
  object Objectify(JToken graphsonObject, GraphSONReader reader);
}

Even though Json.NET is a well-known library, exposing a third-party library type is usually not a good idea as it tightly couples both libraries, ie: IGraphSONDeserializer implementers will have to use Json.NET.

As we are dealing with JSON data, there is a benefit in parsing once and access the parsed data, like its currently implemented (we should avoid using strings and parse multiple times).

I propose using dynamic instead. In C#, an object of type dynamic is basically a dictionary without compile time checks, which is suitable for scenarios like this one.

public class GraphSONReader {
  public dynamic ToObject(dynamic parsedJson) {
    // ... implementation
    string type = parsedJson["@type"];
    // ... get the deserializer for the given type ...
  }
}

public interface IGraphSONDeserializer {
  object Objectify(dynamic graphsonObject, GraphSONReader reader);
}

Issue Links

• links to: GitHub Pull Request #868