Question

I have a legacy application that used binary serialisation to persist the data. Now we wanted to use Json.net 4.5 to serialise the data without much changes to the existing classes.

Things were working nice till we hit a circular dependent class. Is there any workaround to solve this problem?

Sample code as shown below

[Serializable]
class Department : ISerializable
{
    public Employee Manager { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }

    public Department() { }
    public Department( SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context )
    {
        Manager = ( Employee )info.GetValue( "Manager", typeof( Employee ) );
        Name = ( string )info.GetValue( "Name", typeof( string ) );
    }
    public void GetObjectData( SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context )
    {
        info.AddValue( "Manager", Manager );
        info.AddValue( "Name", Name );
    }
}

[Serializable]
class Employee : ISerializable
{
    [NonSerialized] //This does not work
    [XmlIgnore]//This does not work
    private Department mDepartment;
    public Department Department
    {
        get { return mDepartment; }
        set { mDepartment = value; }
    }

    public string Name { get; set; }

    public Employee() { }
    public Employee( SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context )
    {
        Department = ( Department )info.GetValue( "Department", typeof( Department ) );
        Name = ( string )info.GetValue( "Name", typeof( string ) );
    }

    public void GetObjectData( SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context )
    {
        info.AddValue( "Department", Department );
        info.AddValue( "Name", Name );
    }
}

And the test code

Department department = new Department();
department.Name = "Dept1";

Employee emp1 = new Employee { Name = "Emp1", Department = department };
department.Manager = emp1;

Employee emp2 = new Employee() { Name = "Emp2", Department = department };
IList<Employee> employees = new List<Employee>();
employees.Add( emp1 );
employees.Add( emp2 );

var memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
var formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
formatter.Serialize( memoryStream, employees );

memoryStream.Seek( 0, SeekOrigin.Begin );
IList<Employee> deserialisedEmployees = formatter.Deserialize( memoryStream ) as IList<Employee>; //Works nicely

JsonSerializerSettings jsonSS= new JsonSerializerSettings();
jsonSS.TypeNameHandling = TypeNameHandling.Objects;
jsonSS.TypeNameAssemblyFormat = FormatterAssemblyStyle.Full;
jsonSS.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
jsonSS.ReferenceLoopHandling = ReferenceLoopHandling.Ignore; //This is not working!!
//jsonSS.ReferenceLoopHandling = ReferenceLoopHandling.Serialize; //This is also not working!!
jsonSS.PreserveReferencesHandling = PreserveReferencesHandling.All;
string jsonAll = JsonConvert.SerializeObject( employees, jsonSS ); //Throws stackoverflow exception

Edit1: The issue has been reported to Json (http://json.codeplex.com/workitem/23668)

Edit2: Serialization works fine in version 4.5 R11 but de-serialization still not working

Edit3: Actually Serialization itself is not working when circular reference object is not null

Edit4: Comment from the Json.net issue base is that the problem is at your end and closed the issue. But i could not find out what is wrong with my code. I posted another question regarding this. Thank you all for answering, voting…

Answer 1

I think you’ll need both ReferenceLoopHandling.Serialize and PreserveReferencesHandling.All to replicate the behavior of binary serialization. The resulting JSON may not be nearly as pretty, though.

EDIT: I’ve looked deeper into JSON.Net 4.5r10 and discovered a deficiency: JsonSerializerInternalWriter doesn’t check #ShouldWriteReference for references obtained via ISerializable.

With the foreach loop in #SerializeISerializable rewritten as below, your object graph round-trips successfully.

  foreach (SerializationEntry serializationEntry in serializationInfo)
  {
    writer.WritePropertyName(serializationEntry.Name);
    var entryValue = serializationEntry.Value;
    var valueContract = GetContractSafe(entryValue);
    if (ShouldWriteReference(entryValue, null, valueContract, null, member))
    {
      WriteReference(writer, entryValue);
    }
    else
    {
      SerializeValue(writer, entryValue, valueContract, null, null, member);
    }
  }