Question

I am looking for a way to ensure that only serializable objects are stored into a Dictionary in C#.

To be more specific I’m looking to do something similar to this:

Dictionary<String, ISerializable> serialDict = new Dictionary<String, ISerializable>();

The problem with this is that I cannot store primitive types like integers, booleans, or strings.

Is there a way to ensure that my Dictionary contains only objects which can be serialized?

Answer 1

I don’t think you can do this at compile-time, but you can do it at runtime. If you build your own class deriving from Dictionary<TKey, TValue>, then in the constructor of your class, you can check the attributes attached to the TValue type, and make sure SerializableAttribute is one of them, else throw an exception.

All of the standard primitive types (int, bool, etc.) have this attribute.