Question

After writing and reading an xml string to and from a stream, it ceases to be deserializable. The new string is clipped.

string XmlContent = getContentFromMyDataBase();
XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyObj));
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(ms);
char[] ca = XmlContent.ToCharArray();      // still working up to this point.
ms.Position = 0;
sw.Write(ca);
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(ms);
ms.Position = 0;
string XmlContentAgain = sr.ReadToEnd();
Console.WriteLine(XmlContentAgain);        // (outputstring is too short.)
MyObj theObj = (MyObj)xs.Deserialize(ms);  // Can't deserialize.

Any suggestions as to how to fix this or what is causing the problem? My only guess is that there is some form of encoding issue, but I wouldn’t know how to go about finding/fixing it.

Additionally, myObj has a generic dictionary member, which typically isn’t serializable, so I have stolen code from Paul Welter in order to serialize it.

Answer 1

Try flushing and disposing or even better simplify your code using a StringReader:

string xmlContent = getContentFromMyDataBase();
var xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyObj));
using (var reader = new StringReader(xmlContent))
{
    var theObj = (MyObj)xs.Deserialize(reader);
}

Note: The getContentFromMyDataBase method also suggests that you are storing XML in your database that you are deserializing back to an object. Don’t.