Question

I have a file uploading logic and a very specific business rules. And according them I should parse my filemodel to row, which looks like “Header:{processed field1},{processed field2},{processed field3},{processed field4},{processed field5},{processed field6},{processed field7},{processed field8} and so on for 19 params” It’s initially custom serialization.

And I also should have possibility to parse this row back to object. So, the question is what is a common idea to codding such staff?

Because now for parsing model to row I just use string.format with many options, and for parsing row to model I split the row by ‘,’ and then manipulation with parts of information assign it to models fields. But in this implementation there are a lot of low level work, some hard coded position and also a lot of things that do not look pretty for me.

Answer 1

You should put your serialization / deserialization inside a custom serializer. You can follow the same pattern as the other serializers in the .net library and implement the IFormatter interface . This would provide you with a common interface that you can use to stream to and from a file (or any stream):

using (var fileStream = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Create))
{
    var formatter = new CustomFormatter();
    formatter.Serialize(fileStream, objectToSerialize);
}

using (var fileStream = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Read))
{
    var formatter = new CustomFormatter();
    return (CustomType)formatter.DeSerialize(fileStream);
}

You can see an example of a custom formatter in this download