Question

I am using .Net 2 and the normal way to store my settings. I store my custom object serialized to xml. I am trying to retrieve the default value of the property (but without reseting other properties). I use:

ValuationInput valuationInput = (ValuationInput) Settings.Default.Properties['ValuationInput'].DefaultValue; 

But it seems to return a string instead of ValuationInput and it throws an exception.

I made a quick hack, which works fine:

string valuationInputStr = (string)  Settings.Default.Properties['ValuationInput'].DefaultValue; XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ValuationInput)); ValuationInput valuationInput = (ValuationInput) xmlSerializer.Deserialize(new StringReader(valuationInputStr)); 

But this is really ugly – when I use all the tool to define a strongly typed setting, I don’t want to serialize the default value myself, I would like to read it the same way as I read the current value: ValuationInput valuationInput = Settings.Default.ValuationInput;

Answer 1

At some point, something, somewhere is going to have to use Xml Deserialization, whether it is you or a wrapper inside the settings class. You could always abstract it away in a method to remove the ‘ugly’ code from your business logic.

public static T FromXml<T>(string xml) {     XmlSerializer xmlser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));     using (System.IO.StringReader sr = new System.IO.StringReader(xml))     {         return (T)xmlser.Deserialize(sr);     } } 

http://www.vonsharp.net/PutDownTheXmlNodeAndStepAwayFromTheStringBuilder.aspx