Question

I’m having some problems with deserializing an object.

I have following classes:

Metadatastore:

[DataContract]
public class MetadataStore : IEnumerable<ItemMetadata>
{
    private List<ItemMetadata> data = new List<ItemMetadata>();
    private string folderPath = null;

    [DataMember]        
    public string FilePath
    {
      // getter and setter
    }

    [DataMember]        
    public List<ItemMetadata> Data
    {
      // getter and setter
    }

}

ItemMetadata:

[Serializable()]
public class ItemMetadata
{
 // syncid, syncversion, uristring etc..
}

The problem:

I’m transferring a Metadatastore object from my server(which has a wcf service running) to my client by using an output parameter. So serialization/deserialization of this output param is automatically done by wcf I suppose.
This is what happens:

the client calls the service:

service.GetChangeBatch(out metadatastore_object, otherValue);

the server responds correctly (metadatastore_object is filled and serialized successfully -> no errors)

the object I receive on client side though is not correct: the FilePath is filled correctly, but the List Data object contains zero elements! I checked also on the server and the data list contained 2 elements. Another strange thing to note is that it isn’t either null, it’s just a newly created empty list.
Does somebody has some experience with this, I can provide more code if needed.
Thanks in advance. Greets Daan

Answer 1

Use CollectionDataContract instead of DataContract.

Here the msdn’s explanation about CollectionDataContract:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347850.aspx