Question

All —
I have these two methods in one of my classes:

public static void DeSerializeFromXml(out cDBData db, string pathToXML)
{
    using (XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(pathToXML))
    {
        XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(cDBData));
        db = (cDBData)ser.Deserialize(reader);
    }
}

public static void DeSerializeFromXml(out cDatabases db, string pathToXML)
{
    using (XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(pathToXML))
    {
        XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(cDatabases));
        db = (cDatabases)ser.Deserialize(reader);
    }
}

and they work fine but I was wondering why can’t I create an method overload based upon the return type of the method. I thought I read that this was possible somewhere but I am obviously wrong because it doesn’t work:

public static cDBData DeSerializeFromXml(string pathToXML)
{
    cDBData db;

    using (XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(pathToXML))
    {
        XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(cDBData));
        db = (cDBData)ser.Deserialize(reader);
    }
    return db;
}

public static cDatabases DeSerializeFromXml(string pathToXML)
{
    cDatabases db;

    using (XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(pathToXML))
    {
        XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(cDatabases));
        db = (cDatabases)ser.Deserialize(reader);
    }
    return db;
}

Thanks for your thoughtful responses

Thanks to dlev, here are the final solutions

    public static T DeSerializeFromXml<T>(string pathToXML)
    {
        T db;

        using (XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(pathToXML))
        {
            XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            db = (T)ser.Deserialize(reader);
        }
        return db;
    }

    public static void SerializeToXml<T>(T db, string pathToXML)
    {
        using (var fileStream = new FileStream(pathToXML, FileMode.Create))
        {
            var ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
            ser.Serialize(fileStream, db);
        }
    }

I wanted to get these posted before the Search Police close down this question.

Answer 1

You can’t do that because C# simply does not support that kind of overloading. You can achieve a similar effect by making the method generic, and returning the the generic parameter type:

public static T DeSerializeFromXml<T>(string pathToXML)
{
    T db;

    using (XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(pathToXML))
    {
        XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        db = (T)ser.Deserialize(reader);
    }
    return db;
}

You can then call the functions like so:

DeSerializeFromXml<cDatabases>(pathToXml);

While that’s not quite what you wanted, it does have the benefit of only requiring a single method.