ASP.NET MVC - Cascading Drop-Down Circular Reference Error

Question

I have three classes MainMenu, SubMenu and Secondary SubMenu. I have a cascading drop down box which is used when creating Secondary Submenu. A main menu is selected which then shows a drop down with sub menus. When I select an item in the MainMenu drop-down box I get an error:

System.InvalidOperationException: A circular reference was detected while serializing an object of type 'System.Reflection.Module'.

The SubMenu references the MainMenu and the SecondaryMenu references the SubMenu.

I'm not sure where to begin looking for the error?

Answer 1

Well, what is SubMenu?

This typically happens with tree serializers (such as XmlSerializer and JSON implementations, etc) if you have a "parent" relationship. Does your sub-menu know about its parent? Can you make this an internal property, perhaps? Or mark it to be ignored?

Answer 2

The Json methods convert any object structure to Json using reflection/recursion if an object A references another object B that in turn references object A you got yourself an infinite loop. Does submenu have parent and children properties ? If so in most cases you only need the 1.

Answer 3

I was able to solve the error with the help of the following link