How to describe models

I have a couple of routes that return non-primitive types. I know how to include them in the swagger specification, but how do I influence the types and documentation of the properties on those models. E.g. a DateTime property is always exposed in the Swagger spec as a string.

[jnallard]

What does the JSON look like?

SwaggerTypeMapping.AddTypeMapping(typeof(DateTime), typeof(DateTime)); won’t work because the type mapping happens before the actual modeling. So DateTime will map to DateTime, but DateTime will still be treated like a primitive string.

What you could do (as I said above) is SwaggerTypeMapping.AddTypeMapping(typeof(DateTime), typeof(DateTimeDTO)); where DateTimeDTO is a class that has all the properties from DataTime you want the consumer to be aware of. I think that would work. If not, you might have to have the swagger model say it’s a DateTimeDTO. (Which should be easy to do - I can tell you how to do it, but I’d need to know how you’re modeling the data)

I personally would dislike adding other code to manage this, because, as @yahehe said, Datetime should be represented as a string in the Swagger Spec.

[jnallard]

We should probably have DateTime reflected as a string automatically. (I thought we did).

Anyways, you can make use of SwaggerTypeMapping: https://github.com/yahehe/Nancy.Swagger/blob/master/src/Nancy.Swagger/SwaggerTypeMapping.cs

It should allow you to represent any type as whatever type you want. I use it on of my projects to represent a Units.Net struct as a string and I wrote a custom json serializer/deserializer to make the conversion.

For DateTime you would want a line like: SwaggerTypeMapping.AddTypeMapping(typeof(DateTime), typeof(string));

I’ll add this info to the wiki.