Question

I have a class like this that I want to save in ViewState for an asp.net UserControl. It basically extends a generic list with a few methods but also adds some properties, e.g.

public class MyListClass: List<MyObject>
{
    public string ExtraData;
 // some public methods
}

MyObject is serializable, with methods implemented like this:

[Serializable()]
class MyObject 
{
    public MyObject(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext ctxt)
    {
        Prop1 = (string)info.GetValue("Prop1", typeof(string));
        //...
    }
    public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext ctxt)
    {
        info.AddValue("Prop1",Prop1);
    }
}

And generic lists are inherently serializable. ViewState works fine with List<MyObject> but I can’t seem to figure out how to implement serialization for MyListClass.

Intuitively what I want to do is something like this:

public MyListClass(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext ctxt)
{
    ExtraData= (string)info.GetValue("ExtraData", typeof(string));
    this = (List<MyClass>)info.GetValues("BaseList",typeof(List<MyClass>));
}

Obviously that won’t work. What is the right way to do this?

Answer 1

You should just be able to put the Serializable tag on MyListClass, which will cause ExtraData to be serialized as its own field.