Question

I am trying to use the XMLSerializer with a castle active record class which looks like the following:

[ActiveRecord('Model')] public class DataModel : ActiveRecordBase {     private IList<Document> documents;      [XmlArray('Documents')]     public virtual IList<Document> Documents     {         get { return documents; }         set         {             documents = value;             }     } } 

However, the XMLSerializer runs into trouble because of the IList interface. (Raises exception: Cannot serialize member ‘DataModel.Documents’ of type ‘System.Collections.Generic.IList`1….)

I read elsewhere that this is a limitation in the XMLSerializer and the recommended workaround is to declare it as a List<T> interface instead.

Therefore I tried changing the IList<Document> to List<Document>. This causes ActiveRecord to raise an Exception: Type of property DataModel.Documents must be an interface (IList, ISet, IDictionary or their generic counter parts). You cannot use ArrayList or List as the property type.

So, the question is: How do you use the XMLSerializer with a Castle ActiveRecord containing an IList member?

Answer 1

Interesting… the best I can suggest is to use [XmlIgnore] on Documents – and does ActiveRecord have a similar way of ignoring a member? You could do something like:

[XmlIgnore] public virtual IList<Document> Documents {     get { return documents; }     set     {         documents = value;         } }  [Tell ActiveRecord to ignore this one...] [XmlArray('Documents'), XmlArrayItem('Document')] [Browsable(false), EditorBrowsable(EditorBrowsableState.Never)] public Document[] DocumentsSerialization {     get {          if(Documents==null) return null;          return Documents.ToArray(); // LINQ; or do the long way     }     set {          if(value == null) { Documents = null;}          else { Documents = new List<Document>(value); }     } }