Question

For serializing large enum instances, I was thinking of using a “serialization proxy” where the proxy object would be a very small object uniquely identifying the corresponding enum instance. However I found out that any read/writeObject or resolve/replace methods are ignored for enums. So my question is, how would I efficiently serialize large enum instances? A String/XML representation is a possibility, but my feeling is this would be a maintenance issue.

Answer 1

You’re reinventing what is already done by default by the Java serialization:

Quote from
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/serialization/relnotes15.html:

Support has been added to serialization to handle enumerated types,
which are new in version 5.0. The rules for serializing an enum
instance differ from those for serializing an “ordinary” serializable
object: the serialized form of an enum instance consists only of its
enum constant name, along with information identifying its base enum
type. Deserialization behavior differs as well–the class information
is used to find the appropriate enum class, and the Enum.valueOf
method is called with that class and the received constant name in
order to obtain the enum constant to return.