.NET 8.0 Isolated Azure Durable Functions: Preserve Stack Order When Passing Between Orchestrators, Activities etc

In this post let's see how we can preserve Stack<T> order when it's getting passed between Orchestrators/Activities in a .NET Isolated Azure Durable Function. 

In Durable Functions in the .NET isolated worker, the Serialization default behavior has changed from Newtonsoft.Json to System.Text.Json.

I have already written a post about preserving Stack Order in an In-Process Azure Durable Functionshere. I am using the same code example, instead converted it to isolated worker. So I am not going to write down the entire example code to describe the issue here, you can have a look at the previous post.

You can see in the below screenshot, the order of Stack<T> is not preserved with default Serializer options.

Incorrect Result

With Isolated Durable Functions, we can easily configure the JsonSerializerOptions. We need to add a custom JsonConverter that correctly serializes and deserializes a Stack<T>. There is already JsonConverterFactoryForStackOfT shared by the .NET team that we can use in our Isolated Durable Function as follows.

using DurableFunctions.Isolated.StackSerialization.Converters;
using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting;
using System.Text.Json;
 
IHost host = new HostBuilder()
    .ConfigureFunctionsWorkerDefaults()
    .ConfigureServices(services =>
    {
        services.Configure<JsonSerializerOptions>(options =>
        {
            // Add custom converter to serialize and deserialize a Stack<T>
            options.Converters.Add(new JsonConverterFactoryForStackOfT());
        });
    })
    .Build();
 
host.Run();

And now once the Serializer options are configured, we can see Stack<T> is getting serialized/deserialized correctly.

Correct Result

Sample code:
   DurableFunctions.Isolated.StackSerialization

Hope this helps.

Happy Coding.

Regards,

Jaliya