Question

I want to save all the metadata connected to a file system, but not the “useful” data. The metadata should be available for viewing even when the original files aren’t.

I first thought that I could accomplish this by serializing for example a DirectoryInfo object, but I now understand that the object doesn’t actually save the data but rather merely saves the path and accesses the file itself when the methods are called. Thus serialization would be worthless, since the deserialized object would look for the file instead of “remembering” the metadata.

So: is there some kind of built in framework class for doing this or should I just implement it myself?

Answer 1

This object is an object hierarchy so it could get a bit tricky to serialize? You might try creating an a simple object to model the data you want to save. You could then use AutoMapper to copy the data over into the DTO-like object and then serialize that. This way if you wanted to actually persist the entire tree of data you could without writing much code.