Question

I’m having a hard time with my design in the serialization of objects.

Let my show you my scenario. I’ve got a general Configuration class and contains three properties:

public sealed class Configuration
{
    public Configuration(string name, Levels level, ConfigurationSpec spec)
    {
        this.Name = name;
        this.Level = level;
        this.Spec = spec;
    }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public Levels Level { get; set; }
    public ConfigurationSpec Spec { get; set; }
}

The last property is imporant, because it’s an abstract class and it can derived from others classes:

public class ConfigurationSpec { }
public class BinaryConfiguration : ConfigurationSpec
{
    public Range<int> Range1 { get; set; }
    public Range<int> Range2 { get; set; }

    public BinaryConfiguration()
    {
        this.Range1 = new Range<int>();
        this.Range2 = new Range<int>();
    }

    public BinaryConfiguration(Range<int> range1, Range<int> range2)
    {
        this.Range1 = range1;
        this.Range2 = range2;
    }
}

public class Range<T> where T : IComparable<T>
{
    private T _min;
    private T _max;

    public Range()
    {
    }

    public Range(T min, T max)
    {
        this.Min = min;
        this.Max = max;
    }

    public T Min
    {
        get { return _min; }
        set { _min = value; }
    }

    public T Max
    {
        get { return _max; }
        set { _max = value; }
    }

All of this contain the ConfigurationSpec class. And the real problem is, I’m gonna add many Specs derived from ConfigurationSpec, I mean hundreds.

<Configuration>
    <!-- Maybe here it'll be good specify the type -->
    <ConfigurationSpec>
        <Range1 X="2" Y="4" />
        <Range2 X="5" Y="10" />
    </ConfigurationSpec>
</Configuration>

And I want to know how can I write and read all of this classes from a XmlFile for the serialization.

If you have any doubt, please let me know

Answer 1

As long as your Configuration class has a reference to the ConfigurationSpec it will correctly serialize/deserialize all the object they are needed.

Talking about ConfigurationSpec only the type referenced by the Configuration will be serializated(when you serialize an instance of Configuration).
In other word if you got 5 different ConfigurationSpec only the one you will pass to the Configuration constructor will be serializeted