I'm developing a web application where the backend is a REST web API written in ASP.net Core 5 and the frontend is an Angular application written in TypeScript.
One of my ASP.net backend APIs returns an instance of this C# object:
public class MyClass
{
DateTime expires {get; set;}
string ticket {get; set;}
}
In my Angular app, I call this API with Angular's HTTP Client and deserialize the result as an instance of the following TypeScript class:
export class MyClass
{
expires: Date;
ticket: string;
}
However, this doesn't work properly because because if I inspect the TypeScript object once it has been returned I can see that the expires field actually contains a string, not a Date object.
I imagine this happens because the data travels between backend and frontend in JSON format, which doesn't support types but only knows about strings and numbers, so the C# DateTime object is converted to a string.
My question is: what is the best way to handle this problem? I would like to keep my objects strongly typed if possible... is there some configuration I can do on the ASP.net and/or Angular side so that this kind of serialization works automatically? Or if not, what is the next best approach?
This is the solution I put together from the suggested answers in the comments:
return this.http.get<MyClass>(restUrl, { observe: 'response' })
.pipe(map(response => {
if (response.ok) {
response.body.expires = new Date(response.body.expires);
this.setLoginResult(response.body);
}
return response;
}));