Question

I am wondering if I am missing anything here… My understanding is that I should be able to get the ID property (but not set it) after deserializing. As it stands, the ID property is not brought along at all:

namespace CableSolve.Orders.Core.Dto
{
    [Serializable]
    [XmlRoot("Task"), SoapType("Task")]
    public class TaskDto : IDto
    {
        // ReSharper disable ConvertToAutoPropertyWithPrivateSetter
        private int _id;
        public int ID { get { return _id; } }
        // ReSharper restore ConvertToAutoPropertyWithPrivateSetter
        public int TaskSequence { get; set; }

        public TaskDto()
        {
        }
    }
}

Ideally my ID would not be settable. If I give the ID property an automatic, private setter — XML Serializer throws a fit. I thought the workaround for that was described here, but it does not appear to work for non-collections? I would prefer to not have to rewrite using DataContract at this point in time.

‘CableSolve.Web.Api.WorkflowServicesProxy.TaskDto’ does not contain a definition for ‘ID’ and no extension method ‘ID’ accepting a first argument of type ‘CableSolve.Web.Api.WorkflowServicesProxy.TaskDto’ could be found

Answer 1

The deserialiser is just C# code. It requires a setter for a serialised property. Thus you must have a getter and setter for every property that is to be serialised by XML serializer; it also requires the property to be public.

Also you do not need an empty constructor for the class.

[Serializable]
[XmlRoot("Task"), SoapType("Task")]
public class TaskDto : IDto
{
    public int ID { get; set; }
    public int TaskSequence { get; set; }
}

For more info, see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.serialization.xmlserializer.aspx