Question

i am writing a c# project and i am trying to deserialize an object that has a field of type int[] and i want to make the deserialization in another manner.

Say i have a class:

class Player
{
   public string Name;
   public int[] Spells;
}

And a xml file from which i deserialize an instance of class Player:

<Player>
  <Name>John</Name>
  <Spells>
    <int>1</int>
    <int>5</int>
    <int>9</int>
  </Spells>
</Player>

The thing is i don’t want that the xml file to look like that , i want it to be more like this:

<Player>
  <Name>John</Name>
  <Spells>1 5 9</Spells>
</Player>

I am using XmlSerializer and it only deserialize the field Spells only when reading form first xml . I wonder if it is a way to deserialize a int array just like a simple field.

Answer 1

One of the way could be creating another property that would take space delimited set for serialization purposes. For example,

class Player
{
   public string Name;

   [XmlIgnore]
   public int[] Spells;

   [XmlElement("Spells")
   public string SpellsString
   {
     get
     {
        // array to space delimited string
     }
     set
     {
       // string to array conversion
     }
   }
}