❔ WEBAPI [FromBody] Json with optional elements

I am building a .net Wep API application where I will be receiving requests where all of the data is in the JSON body. I understand this is not the preferred way to do this but this is how I have to do it for this application. I will receive a post from my frontend which essentially looks like this

{
        "userID": "",
        "token": "",
        "conversationID": "",
        "starttimestamp": "", optional
        "endtimestamp": "", optional
}

My code is able to process this provided both startTimestamp and endTimestamp are occupied. However as they are optional attributes they will sometimes be absent from requests and in those cases I receive an error

{
    "type": "https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.5.1",
    "title": "One or more validation errors occurred.",
    "status": 400,
    "traceId": "00-8e1d4ff06e05e21050e95e3255d1828b-57d0cca122b223fd-00",
    "errors": {
        "endtimestamp": [
            "The endtimestamp field is required."
        ],
        "starttimestamp": [
            "The starttimestamp field is required."
        ]
    }
}

I would like to be able to make these field not required but I am uncertain how.
My method which receives the request starts like this

 [HttpPost]
        [Route("RouteHere")]
        public string reqUpdate([FromBody] MessageUpdate req)
        {

and a MessageUpdate looks like this

   public class MessageUpdate
    {
        [JsonProperty(Required=Required.Always)]
        public string userID { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty(Required = Required.Always)]
        public string token { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty(Required = Required.Always)]
        public string conversationID { get; set;}

        [DefaultValue(null)]
        [JsonProperty(DefaultValueHandling = DefaultValueHandling.Populate)]
        public string starttimestamp { get; set; }
        [DefaultValue(null)]
        [JsonProperty(DefaultValueHandling = DefaultValueHandling.Populate)]
        public string endtimestamp { get; set; }  

    }

Make the optional properties nullable?

through like an attribute tag do you mean?

Through... making them nullable

aren't strings nullable?

What version of .NET?

7

Then no, they're not

Unless you manually edited the project file to make reference types nullable by default

interesting. How can I change what I have to make it nullable then?

Like with literally any other type

T is not nullable, T? is nullable

so like

 [DefaultValue(null)]
        [JsonProperty(DefaultValueHandling = DefaultValueHandling.Populate)]
        public string? starttimestamp { get; set; }
        [DefaultValue(null)]
        [JsonProperty(DefaultValueHandling = DefaultValueHandling.Populate)]
        public string? endtimestamp { get; set; }  

not sure why it spaced that all wierdly

That should do the trick, yeah

Awesome! Let me try it out

Heyyyy! that worked! Thank you so much! My friend is hounding me relentlessly to solve this part of my code and its stressing me out. You're a life saver

Nice

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