Question

I have the following code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

namespace ConsoleApplication28
{
class Program
{

    static void Main()
    {
        List<string> dirs = FileHelper.GetFilesRecursive(@"c:\Documents and Settings\bob.smith\Desktop\Test");
        foreach (string p in dirs)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(p);
        }

        //Write Count
        Console.WriteLine("Count: {0}", dirs.Count);
        Console.Read();

    }

    static class FileHelper
    {
        public static List<string> GetFilesRecursive(string b)
        {
            // 1.
            // Store results in the file results list.
            List<string> result = new List<string>();

            // 2.
            // Store a stack of our directories.
            Stack<string> stack = new Stack<string>();

            // 3.
            // Add initial directory.
            stack.Push(b);

            // 4.
            // Continue while there are directories to process
            while (stack.Count > 0)
            {
                // A.
                // Get top directory
                string dir = stack.Pop();

                try
                {
                    // B
                    // Add all files at this directory to the result List.
                    result.AddRange(Directory.GetFiles(dir, "*.*"));

                    // C
                    // Add all directories at this directory.
                    foreach (string dn in Directory.GetDirectories(dir))
                    {
                        stack.Push(dn);
                    }
                }
                catch
                {
                    // D
                    // Could not open the directory
                }
            }
            return result;
        }
    }
}
}

The code above works well for recursively finding what files/directories lie in a folder on my c:.
I am trying to serialize the results of what this code does to an XML file but I am not sure how to do this.

My project is this: find all files/ directories w/in a drive, serialize into an XML file. Then, the second time i run this app, i will have two XML files to compare. I then want to deserialize the XML file from the first time i ran this app and compare differences to the current XML file and produce a report of changes (i.e. files that have been added, deleted, updated).

I was hoping to get some help as I am a beginner in C# and i am very very shaky on serializing and deserializing. I’m having lots of trouble coding. Can someone help me?

Thanks

Answer 1

Your result is List<string> and that is not directly serializable. You’ll have to wrap it, a minimal approach:

[Serializable]
class Filelist: List<string> {  }

And then the (De)Serialization goes like:

Filelist data = new Filelist(); // replaces List<string>

// fill it

using (var stream = File.Create(@".\data.xml"))
{
    var formatter = new System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapFormatter();
    formatter.Serialize(stream, data);
}    

data = null; // lose it

using (var stream = File.OpenRead(@".\data.xml"))
{
    var formatter = new System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.SoapFormatter();
    data = (Filelist) formatter.Deserialize(stream);
}

But note that you will not be comparing the XML in any way (not practical). You will compare (deserialzed) List instances. And the XML is SOAP formatted, take a look at it. It may not be very useful in another context.

And therefore you could easily use a different Formatter (binary is a bit more efficient and flexible).

Or maybe you just want to persist the List of files as XML. That is a different question.