Question

I have a client / server application made with C#. Its working fine when i send Strings of messages to the server. But i need to send (simple) objects to the server instead of Strings. But i’m not sure how to do this. I currently have this for my client:

The class i want to send:

[Serializable]
public class Actions
{
// Movement
public bool forward = false;
public bool left = false;
public bool backward = false;
public bool right = false;
}

---

Then i send the object using the default Send() command. But before that happends i convert the Actions class to a byte array first like so:

public void SendObject ( object obj )
{
    this.socket.Send ( this.ObjectToByteArray ( obj ) );
}

// Convert an object to a byte array
private byte[] ObjectToByteArray(object obj)
{
    if(obj == null)
        return null;

    BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
    MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
    bf.Serialize(ms, obj);
    return ms.ToArray();
}

---

On the server side i receive the data like this (and thats were i’m stuck at…):

public void OnDataReceived(IAsyncResult asyn)
{
    SocketPacket socketData = (SocketPacket)asyn.AsyncState;
    try
    {
        // Complete the BeginReceive() asynchronous call by EndReceive() method
        // which will return the number of characters written to the stream 
        // by the client
        int iRx  = socketData.m_currentSocket.EndReceive (asyn);
        char[] chars = new char[iRx +  1];

        // CONVERT THE BYTE ARRAY BACK TO AN OBJECT
        //object Cls = this.ByteArrayToObject ( socketData.dataBuffer );
    }
    catch ( ... ) { }
}

What do i have to do so i can access the object on the server?? Obviously when i do:
Cls.forward;

Then it gives me an error because it doesn’t know what properties the object has. Anyone any idea how to do this??

Answer 1

Cast it from an object into a Actions:

object Cls = this.ByteArrayToObject ( socketData.dataBuffer );
Actions action = (Actions)Cls;

That’s the simplest way to do it. You should also add exception handling, type checking, etc.