Question

I am using the following function to attempt to serialize an object to XML..

 public static string SerializeObject<T>(T obj)
        {
            try
            {
                string xmlString = null;
                MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
                XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
                XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8);
                xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, obj);
                memoryStream = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream;
                xmlString = UTF8ByteArrayToString(memoryStream.ToArray()); return xmlString;
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                return string.Empty;
            }
        }

When attempting to serialize an object that has an IList property in it, I get the following exception..

Cannot serialize member 'ObjectModel.Order.LineItems' of type 'System.Collections.Generic.IList

Can someone help me change my function to accommodate for this scenario?

Is there anything I can do this existing code to look into the input object. If its of type Ilist change it to a List? Can somoeone help me with code for that if its at all possible??

Answer 1

There’s no great solution for this, only the workaround of using a concrete type like List<T> in this case – you could either change the existing property to be List<T> or add an additional property used just for serialization of type List<T> (and XML-ignore your existing property).