Can I prevent a specific datamember from being deserialized?

Question

I have a datacontract like this

[DataContract]
class MyDC 
{
    [DataMember]
    public string DM1;

    [DataMember]
    public string DM2;

    [DataMember]
    public string DM3;
}

and sometimes I want to prevent DM2 from being deserialized when being returned from an OperationContract. Something like this:

[OperationContact]
public MyDC GetMyDC()
{
    MyDC mdc = new MyDC();

    if (condition)
    {
        // Code to prevent DM2 from being deserialized  
    }

    return mdc;
}

I could always make a new DataContract that has only DM1 and DM3 and generate that from the MyDC instance but I want to see if it is possible to programatically remove DM2. Is it possible? How?

Answer 1

[DataContract]
class MyDC 
{
    [DataMember]
    public string DM1;

    public string DM2;

    public bool IsDM2Serializable;

    [DataMember(Name="DM2", EmitDefaultValue = false)]
    public string DM2SerializedConditionally
    {
        get
        {
            if(IsDM2Serializable)
                return null;
            return DM2;
        }
        set { DM2=value; }
    }

    [DataMember]
    public string DM3;
}

Then set IsDM2Serializable to false when you need to hide it:

[OperationContact]
public MyDC GetMyDC()
{
    MyDC mdc = new MyDC();

    if (condition)
    {
        // Code to prevent DM2 from being serialized  
        mdc.IsDM2Serializable = false;
    }

    return mdc;
}