Question

I am trying to Serialize a Class object and store the xml in a string but each time I get an exception message “There was an error generating xml document”

The class object I am trying to serialize is of class:

[XmlRoot("FlowOfTask")] 
public class Flow
{
    int _CurrHop = 0;

    [XmlElement("CurrentHop")]
    public int CurrentHop
    {
        get { return _CurrHop; }
        set { _CurrHop = value; }
    }

    int _TotalHops = 0;

    [XmlElement("TotalHops")]
    public int TotalHops
    {
        get { return _TotalHops; }
    }

    private List<tblTaskHop> _TaskHops;

    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlArrayItemAttribute(ElementName = "Hop",
    IsNullable = false)]
    public List<tblTaskHop> TaskHops
    {
        get { return _TaskHops; }
    }
    public Flow()
    {

    }

    public Flow(Int64 TaskID, Int64 RoleID)
    {
        _TaskHops = HandleDB.tblTaskHopGetByTaskIDRoleID(TaskID, RoleID);
        _TotalHops = TaskHops.Count;
    }

}

I am using this function to serialize.

public static string SerializeAnObject(object item)
{

    try
    {
        string xmlText;

        //Get the type of the object
        Type objectType = item.GetType();

        //create serializer object based on the object type
        XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(objectType);

        //Create a memory stream handle the data
        MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();

        //Create an XML Text writer to serialize data to
        using (XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter =
            new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8) { Formatting = Formatting.Indented })
        {

            //convert the object to xml data
            xmlSerializer.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, item);

            //Get reference to memory stream
            memoryStream = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream;

            //Convert memory byte array into xml text
            xmlText = new UTF8Encoding().GetString(memoryStream.ToArray());

            //clean up memory stream
            memoryStream.Dispose();
            return xmlText;
        }
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        MessageBox.Show(e.Message);
        return null;
    }
}

Can anyone help me why I am not able to serialize this class object?

Answer 1

Your serialization method should look like this:

public static string SerializeAnObject(Object item) {
    if (item == null)
        return null;

    var stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
    var itemType = item.GetType();

    new XmlSerializer(itemType).Serialize(new StringWriter(stringBuilder), item);

    return stringBuilder.ToString();
}

The function above works when I test it like this:

var test = new Flow();
var xmlString = SerializeAnObject(test);