Keep Pascal Case for JSON Format in Your Sitecore Solution

More and more Sitecore solutions are adopting the architecture that exposes the content from back-end by using REST service. This can be achieved by using Sitecore.Services.Client or ASP.NET Web API to return JSON strings to the front-end.

The default JSON format returned from Sitecore.Services.Client or ASP.NET Web API are using Pascal Case like {"Id":1,"FirstName":"Yuqing"}. However, most front-end developers are feeling awkward to work with JavaScript objects where the first letter of a property name is a capital letter. So I saw some projects change that to Camel Case.

Unfortunately, this would introduce a serious problem in Sitecore after version 8. Sitecore 8 uses SPEAK as the front-end framework for most of its modules. And SPEAK consumes a lot of JSON strings returned from back-end.

Let’s check in List Manager for example.

The following is the default JSON string received in the front-end of List Manager. And it is using Pascal Case.

If your Sitecore solution introduces the Camel Case, then the JSON string would probably look like:

Since JavaScript is a case sensitive language, new camel case JSON string will cause a lot of SPEAK methods failed.

In short, keep using Pascal Case for JSON format in your solution.